One hundred and thirty deliveries! Yep 130, not just delivered but done automatically over a three month period in all sorts of weather.
Well done DHL, I wonder whats inside?
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One hundred and thirty deliveries! Yep 130, not just delivered but done automatically over a three month period in all sorts of weather.
Well done DHL, I wonder whats inside?
You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!
Comments
Just wrote a paper to debunk Prime Air myths, go around patents, demonstrate prior art where applicable and proposed cleaner legal solution for airspace. Got fed up being regular worker at Amazon just because they hire in Poland only for lowest wages, ignoring job applications for Prime Air program. My paper is here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9-O1_5eWoN9WjAzREZIX2JtMFk
For me this things looks way overengineered. It behaves like full-scale aircraft using full-scale aircraft materials. Net result is that most of o those technologies, latches, panzer-rigid cargo covers, antennas, even carbon fiber technology if laid with ruggedness in mind. Thsi design would be scaling very well up, but is also badly scaling down to where it is now. This makes short-legged aircraft. you can read on the van: Institut fur Flugsystem etc. A source of overengineering and short range. Those guys can make excellent large planes... And conduct research properly,.. But they would get mad before trying EPP platform and forget having fun with fancy flight control. They just cannot invent an UAV below 10.000EUR.
@ Rob
Wing body and lots of lead acid batteries in the back? ;-)
I agree the DHL thing is very poor if it can only do 8.4km...quadplanes are way better already.
Rob have you see this? : http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/hybrid-fpv-racer?xg_source=acti...
Interesting concept with that Lilium thing. But... I don't get it. How do they get CG in airplane mode with the wing that far back?
The droneport "parcel station" with snow resistant clamshell protected helipad (with wind direction turning launch turntable!) is a nice touch though. Is anyone developing the ArduCopter equivalent of an opensource hardware droneport (reference design for helipad with a robot arm for dealing with cargo and charging)?
For cargo drones though, would a setup resembling a quadplane, but rather than a fifth prop, have the forward and rear props tilt (so tractor/pusher tiltrotor) be attractive, if it uses the same variable pitch (but not cyclic) prop arrangement?
Speaking of possibly unrealistic large size but maybe realistic small size VTOL's, did anyone see the hubbub over Lilliam Aviation? They apparently have a demo drone prototype working with ESA. Flavors of Aurora's LightningStrike, but with retractable telescopic forward boxfan canards.
http://lilium-aviation.com/
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technology/TTP2...
@Ben,
Maybe with the yacht we could get far enough offshore to where we could actually do this legally.
@ Rob,
I think either a gas or electric heli would be able to perform the tasks that DHL has undertaken more efficiently and with considerably better all weather reliability and performance and greater range and or payload than they have demonstrated.
And with considerably less investment, certainly so if they used one of those nifty Procyon helicopters from Autonomous Systems.
Best,
Gary
At least it's fun to see the small steps towards any practical use in real world. It's a bit like living at the times of the first planes and seeing some concepts (such as biplanes) come and then disappear.
This added to the fact that the annoucements are done by major companies and leave hobbyist community unimpressed because with the same amount of money they could probably do the same plus buying a yacht.
Gary, I think this airplane design could actually have pretty good performance in this size class. I'm not sure it will scale up well (well, nothing makes sense for large scale electric) but this could work.
I would like to know what the actual range is though. I don't see the point if the range is the same as a quadcopter.
In larger sizes, this thing is going to be more complicated than a helicopter.
If you look at the full-scale world, you see that the tilt wing only makes sense for a very limited use case. The case when you MUST have VTOL capability, and must have more range and speed than a helicopter can deliver. Most uses cases, they use a regular airplane with prepared runways at both ends. Or they use a helicopter, and just deal with the shorter range and slower speed (shorter missions, or mid-air refueling).
I have yet to see a use case for a UAV where a gas powered heli wouldn't have the range or speed required for the mission.
Vladimir, I didn't say it was bad. But I have asked repeatedly for some sort of video which shows good performance, and I have just not seen anything. The last one I watched, it was a poor quality hover, indoors in a cage. This is the type of video I would like to see. It's uncut, this is not just the best highlights, and it's in real world conditions.:
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