Good evening to All.
The fifteen plus years of my involvement with airmodelling, has sometimes brought me in strange paths, mysterious driveways, beautiful agony. The journey to Ithaca continues with great passion for research, construction, testing new technologies. In this journey I meet people who inspire me, support me, eventually becoming ... Friends with a capital F. I think that even if I had a second life, this is how I’d like to live it again…
When Dimitris showed me his work of creating an unmanned aerial platform for Precision Agriculture and related mapping applications, I thought ... Oh man… that guy is ingenious! And I wanted to share that creation with him. The effort was finally started among 4 friends with a 5th already helping us on building the airframe, six months ago, we named our team "UcanDrone" and only God knows where all this will lead us, but... he also knows just how much we love it.
A team member suggested this ship should be called Phoreas, which means “carrier” in English, and so we did. It was originally designed as a low drag motorglider, carrying an FPV camera and another one for GIS or other specialized applications, as well as an autopilot. We necessarily had to involve with mold making for the fuselage, motor mount and boom. Everything is handmade, new techniques for me and the team, but we’re steady learning more and more each day. Dimitris’s prototype algorithm shows the health of the Plants by a percentage greater than 95%, directing the owner of the plantation at correct decisions. APM autopilot, developed by an open group of genius people who love what they do, transforms that plane on a fully autonomous and Safe aerial platform, since it not only controls the airspace on which it will be flown, but also corrects the flight behaviour from stalls etc… Nice stuff.
Phoreas as a model plane and Dimitris’s work on Argiculture, was originally presented this year at the annual conference of ASPRS (American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) in Baltimore U.S.A. on March 27th. The road is difficult ahead of us, but our passion will eventually overcome any obstacle.
Specifications:
* Wing Span: 2.400m
* Wing Area: 53.4dm2
* Flying weight: 2700gr (with Autopilot and FPV gear)
* Wing Loading: 50.5gr/dm2
* Flight Time: >1 hour with the Recommended Power Setup (2 x Lithium-Polymer 4s 5000mah Batteries)
For the whole 2013 year, we will keep Phoreas on a Beta form, until everything is ready for the production of the most delicate plane on which we All were involved so far... For more information, please visit this link...
Many Thanks Everyone,
Gadetsakis Apostolos (aka DeltaMan)
UcanDrone – Airframe Department
