After after almost 9 months of application of the SurVoyeur MKII UAV system in the Etosha National Park here in Namibia, The Park and Ministry have added further to their capabilities. Two more Pilots have also completed there training this week, each on both the SurVoyeur MKI and MKII systems. This will enable the Park to fly simultaneous flights in separate areas, day and night if required. The fully automated systems have day and night ( Thermal) imagers and the full autonomy in launch, flight, target designate and track, as well as autolanding, ensure the best survivability in this harsh environment.
Pilot effort in flight control and management is also vastly reduced, a huge plus in the National Parks.
The preceding 9 months of system use has shown many successes and preemptive flights have been shown to act as strong deterrent to would be undesirables, leading to the latest additions.
Congrats to the two new Pilots , Shayne and Isaskar, and their new systems!
Nampilot.
Comments
Great works! Congratulations!
Hi Brewski850,
The autopilot hardware and software is all our own design - my good wife, who used to head up 40 software engineers in a previous life..is the brains behind all the software, I do the flight control , the electronic hardware and the aircraft itself...
The electronic modules are assembled by a contract company in South Africa..No Pick and Place assembly capability in Namibia..
Propulsion is electric and flight time at 1000m ASL 30deg C is 1hour 20min @ 18m/s airspeed. As to range - around 80km , but range is really related to the datalink and video link range - Datalink is 40km and video is 20km - we have a fancy ground based tracking antenna for video - also on my blogs somewhere..
We view video in real time and process in real time on the PC (ground station) and provide tracking command to the aircraft as needed. With the new autopilot we do the video processing on board for point of interest detection, while still sending video to the ground station in real time...
The Nampilot....
Are you running Arduplane on these autopilots or something else. What type of propulsion & range are you getting? I assume that you recording the image intensified & daylight video together with GPS data for later analysis. It is amazing that the planes are being built in Namibia. Cheers..B
@ Hugues
The aircraft are the SurVoyeur systems designed and manufactured by us here in Namibia. If you wish to know any more just dig up some of my blogs here - search maybe for 'Nampilot' and/or 'SurVoyeur'....All composite/Carbon molded airframe, etc.
@Brewski850
The autopilot is also a own design/manufacture - two versions, the 'older' one based on a 32bit AVR processor and the latest one on the STM 32bit CPU , with DSP etc built in for image processing.
Nampilot
Yes Gary, that would be nice! I would very much liked to have been there, but as you see, one gets tied up..!!
I am keen to hear more of your venture, esp maybe some of the more off-line stuff.
Joe
Thanks for all the good words guys! I get a kick out of using this stuff in practical applications here in Namibia- the environment is quite harsh, hot, dry, lots of sand and dust , strong winds, etc. It is also most enlightening to see how the users adapt to and apply this technology - in ways I would not often consider, so it is a fantastic learning environment for all of us and the fact that they obtain real results from the systems application is really satisfying.
Nampilot
Which flight controller are you using?
GG ! Very nice fixed wings too. What's this V tail model ?
Congratulations. Amazing work.
African solutions for global problems (!!)
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