fast vs hangtime

Hi all,

Im new to the forum and to this whole developing field.  Having said that, I am a remote sensing guy and own an aerial imaging business.  We have been working in Hawaii mapping forests with high resolution aerial imagery.  With resent changes and development we are working to come up with a platform and configuration that will allow us to image the more difficult to reach and fly areas.  The basic issue is this, most turn key systems are either limited by consistent resolution on the ground they can get.  To be clear this is all working on the premise of autonomous flight firing cameras at geographic positions.  So the deal is that most fix winged platforms can fly for a long time but cannot fly slow enough or have a camera that fires fast enough to collect images at 1cm resolution on the ground with 60% overlap.  Quad copters can fly slow enough to collect data at that scale consistently but they dont fly long enough to make them viable for these projects that have a long flight to their imaging sight (10 min or more)  That means the copter only gets 10min on site worth of flying before it has to return for a new battery.  There are certainly large scale commectial UAVs that could do what we want but they cost far too much and would mean high costs for the conservation community here.  We are hoping to come up with a low cost platform that can produce the appropriate scale and fly long enough to make the whole thing viable.  SOOOOO, the question to the group is, how do we deal with the trade off between hang time and speed.  It seems like we need a copter style platform with a much longer battery life.  At present the longest I have seen is 35 min.  Its too short.  The other problem is that if we use a fixed wing its likely to crash.  These are steep walled canyons and the winds are also funky.  Planes just dont have the same capacity to deal in those conditions.  Well there it is folks, any great ideas??

Stephen  

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