Hi! I'd like to share something i did about a year ago as a part of my master thesis about aerial construction.

You can read much more about it here: https://www.artyommaxim.com/

This quick experiment used a Leica MS60 Total Station - an instrument often used for positioning machines on a construction site, to guide a quadrotor along a pre planned trajectory, drawn in a CAD design software. 

UAV Colored Trajectory Guidance with Rhino+Grasshopper+ROS+Leica MS60 Multi Station from Artyom Maxim on Vimeo.

Hi everyone!

I'd like to share with you the latest development of our small team - a high-load hexacopter project.

The design is intended to be a compromise between price, power and efficiency. The frame made from locally-sourced square aluminium profiles, motors, props and ESC's ordered from Taobao store, batteries from HobbyKing. 

Total weight is 20 kg, and according to the specs of the motors, the thrust should be around 60 Kg, meaning that it's theoretically possible to lift a 30 kg payload, although that hasn't been tested yet.

Specs:

motors:         BD9340 100KV - super efficient motors!

ESC:            Hobbywing X-Rotor Platinum 80A

batteries:      6x 12000mAh 6S 10-20C 22.2V Turnigy Multistar ( in 12S config., giving 36Ah)

propellers:    3065 CF

FC:               Pixhawk

The tests that had been run so far:

A test with copter on a stand with 100% throttle on -     lasted 22 minutes.

A flight without payload to 3 km distance -                     used around 25% of battery capacity.

A flight with a 10 kg payload to the distance of 1.5 km -   used around 20% of battery capacity.

The last test gives us a probable total flight distance with a 10Kg payload of around 6 km.