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
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.
Are you thinking in a recovery parachute system or something like that?
We return again to the issue of redundancy and fault tolerance. Why quad, why not hex?
Wow. Very interesting.
Please, Keep us informed. I am interested in this project.
Thanx.
Let me return to the issue of wind tolerance...
Really large props and low KV motors don't like wind. I think wind speed tolerance depends on the horizontal speed that the aircraft can reach. Although it is true it will be more sensitive to turbulence (variations in wind speed and direction).
An example:
Microdrones md4-200: http://www.microdrones.com/wiki/index.php/md4-200
Microdrones md4-1000 (28" props, 6s batteries): http://www.microdrones.com/wiki/index.php/md4-1000
Look at the "Cruising speed" and "wind tolerance"
http://vimeo.com/18081455
...or fuel cell, or solar panels... ;)
Anyway, the beauty of fixed wing aircraft (apart from the fact that, unlike 'copters, they can be physically beautiful), is the much lower count of dangerous Dr Evil whizzy things to keep it airborne and stable!
I must resist that 'copter twitch somehow! :)
2 hours.
3 hours.
4 hours on ideal condition.
Over this - you need a nuclear plant onboard. Or a gasoline engine.
Nope, two hours is my best to date.
My biggest plane flew over 12 hours. You too?
When I started playing this game 40 minutes was the holy grail for electric fixed wings, now 5 hours is becoming a standard in high end gear.
Sorry?
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
-
5
of 6 Next