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The sUAS market for surveying applications are dominated by fixed-wing aircraft instead of multicopters. The reason is obvious, the multicopters have very short flight time and can not run long flight plans.

I'm not sure that this will go on for long. There are already many multicopters exceeding the hour and half flight time(only experimental flights without payload). Right now there is technology to stay one hour with a reasonable payload. Part of the "secret" is that the payload represents a small portion of the vehicle weight, which in practice is equivalent to using a larger multicopter.

The advantages of multicopters with respect to planes to do this kind of work where you have to move to an area where, almost certainly, you will not find a meadow of green grass is obviously the launch and recovery. Multirotors no need catapults, nor any parachute and not need landing strip, the roof of a vehicle can serve.

We are working on a very special model, it is a quadrotor with 1280mm diagonal for 27-29 inch propeller and a takeoff weight of about 12Kg. Though not proven, estimate flight time will be about 1 hour with 2 kg of payload.

Printing huge multicopters. All parts of this multicopter but arms and frame plates has been printed in PLA. it have about 112 hours of printing:

Pixhawk. Watch this! Pixhawk size compared to the frame:

(ADDED PICTURES 2-SEP-2014)

Best regards,

Jose Luis Cortes

Quaternium.es