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
Comments
Hello Marius and Nicholas, answered, sorry for my late answer!!!
If somebody is looking for finished and certified solution for heavy lift take a look at this one http://www.dronetechnology.eu/rpas-mcfly-helios/
It has twin chutes to get clearance for urban operations and is approved by local aviation authority. It was designed to carry 7kg ordinary 3D laser scanner for 30-40 min.
It comes with UgCS PRO license as added bonus.
hello, yes! hehehe, i send you a private message
I'm interested in a spidex pro with gimbal for a nex.
it is not a product, i have sold 2 units as prototype, none of them are flying at the moment.
If you are interested please send me a message
Hello Jose! This is looking great!
Will this be sold as a frame-kit or as a complete flying unit?
/Per, Sweden
I leave you some pictures of the finished prototype
Nice! Looking forward to some flight time data.
Just linked to this post from Slashdot. Some people question the effectiveness of multicopters for long range work, and I thought of your post.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/29/127251/google-testing-drone...
Are hexa's more fault tolerant? At the moment I think that ESC's and motors are the usual sources of failure so having less of those ought to be better.
What motivates me to consider hexa's is because it's a tradeoff between payload and endurance. If you have a very light quad you can fly for hours sometimes, but with very little stuff. At the other side of the spectrum you have the octo's that are made for heavy lifting. A hexa is just in between and sounds like a nice compromise.
If you build quads at this size however, the useful payload is more than large enough. In my comparison, I was mostly looking at AUW's in the 1.5-4kg range and getting the most out of those with a useful enough payload size.
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