Thank you Range Video for sponsoring our Wildlife Conservation UAV Team!! We will be announcing our other sponsors as they come on board. The team is rounding out as well. We will be introducing ourselves as we get things organized over the next couple of weeks. Our team is being fielded from here in the states and we have a member in Australia. We are still forming and have room. The team is representing The Lankford Group and our aeronautics research division, Aerial Vista.
For those unfamiliar with the competition, it is a design build challenge to come up with a UAV for anti-poaching operations in Kruger National Park in South Africa. It has to be able to sense weapons on the ground, identify individual animals, ward off poachers till rangers arrive, and of course provide the location of the poachers with GPS. It is an interesting challenge and I feel that we already ninety percent of the way there.
I wish to use the RVJET platform because I feel that it is a well designed and well rounded platform for a variety of missions. It has the capacity to hold enough batteries for extended flights and the camera pods can be fitted with different configurations for day, night, or even mapping missions. I had planned to detail the first RVJET that I have in a build blog but we will actually blog about the entire build for the competition. So the blog will providing multiple purposes. We can't wait to get into this one. I will try to begin introducing the team over the next week and any design developments that we come up with to share. Thank you again to Range Video for being our sponsor and thank you reader for taking the time to peruse our blog.
Comments
Simon, I agree. I am going to convert my fins on this repair. I just crashed yesterday because the hatch came off and into the prop.
Toby, I'm glad you like your RVJET. We got the wing extensions with ours (is that what you are referring to when you say double fuselage?)
As for the Fighting Walrus Radio, right now we are really focused iOS devices since there are no good solutions in that space and certainly none that work with the lighting/30 as an officially sanctioned MFI Apple accessory while there are already android telemetry radios out there. We are also building an open source ground control station for iPad. https://github.com/fightingwalrus/iGCS - Our Austrian partner, Claudio, started the ground station project and that was the genesis for us moving forward with the radio accessory so iGCS can be officially published in the app store.
Thank you all!!! Joshua we are going to do our best!! Andy the RVJET is awesome. I love mine. I am eager to do testing with the double fuselage for the competition. I just went to the Fighting Walrus sight. Your product looks amazing!! Any chance that you are integrating with android?
Our own RVJET just arrived yesterday at Fighting Walrus headquarters here in Brisbane CA. We plan to use it as our fixed wing test platform so I'm excited to hear how your build process goes. Good luck to you!
I'm super excited Toby!!! I sent you the team bio via email. Our team is going to win this thing and bring home 1st prize!
Looking foward to seeing the build log.
Nice job guys!