What do you think could be in this Trex450-style copter that could make it worth $50,000?
From Robots.net:
This small helicopter is called Inceptor and it is the latest product of Insitu, the innovative company behind ScanEagle that is now owned by Boeing. Inceptor weighs only 3.5lbs and fits into a police car trunk. It has an electric motor with swappable lithium polymer batteries. It can fly for around 24min, take-off and land autonomously, navigate and hover via waypoints and also controlled semi-autonomously through a touchscreen. The integrated flight control system is aFCS20 provided by Adaptive Flight Inc.
One can learn to operate it in a few hours and it provides electro-optic or IR imaging immediately even during adverse weather conditions and wind gusts. Video imagery is transmitted to the handheld ground control station and distributed to decision makers for real-time viewing. It flies below 500ft and within line of sight (as dictated by the FAA-issued certificate of authorization).
Inceptor will enter a developing but still very niche market sector that is mostly dominated by quadcopters. Prototypes are already flying and initially it will be available only for US public agencies at a cost of around $50.000. Selected law-enforcement customers will test it soon.
Comments
I bet the sell 100 in a year. Police Departments get Homeland Security grants. Its not like they take it out of their budget. The police department where I work has Segways, gun shot detectors and radars for detecting people in the bushes.
i thought the copter came with the car and whole package was 50 k ;)
Eventually you get tired of hovering the multicopter and start flying forwards, backwards and maybe even sideways. You might also consider making a turn while flying one of those directions... :) My point being that a multicopter IMU has to deal with the same acceleration and pendulum effects as in a airplane.
Chris, regarding complexity of control, multicoper are not really difficult. In contrary you got the benefit of a hovering system which makes your IMU algorithms much easier (some projects even don´t have "real" filtering, just PID-loops from sensors to controls). In a plane you always got problems with your acceleration... Theory should be in all the DCM threads... The fact that you fall out of the sky if any component fails is for sure, anyway :-)
And as far as I know there are many autopilots (closed and open source) which are capable of controlling fixed wing and hovering platforms (just checked: gluonpilot, micropilot, paparazzi, piccolo...).
Regarding the Inceptor, time will tell if it can really help the police... If it´s not really easy to use, they probably won´t accept it. They´ve got enough trouble without a complicated helicopter system. This will be the decision point. Asking for the price comes after.
brakar: those sort of issues are true for any multicopter in these early days, be in Mikrokopter, the AR.DRone or ArduCopter. I think you may be more familiar with planes/fixed wings, but multicopters are 10x more complicated and when things go wrong they fall out of the sky immediately, as opposed to planes, which pretty much just continue flying. You'll note that all the other fixed-wing autopilots (AttoPilot, etc) can only do planes, because it's so much easier. As far as I know, APM is the only universal autopilot in the world, so we're still in bleeding edge territory.
The free market dictates the price. If there is is somebody willing to pay, it is worth it.
They are lucky, The South African police doesnt even have any UAV's at this stage, mind you coming to think of it even our air force's UAV capability is questionable. Yes we do have excellent companies like Denel who put in many hours of R&D to develop top of the range UAV's only to sell it elsewhere since the SANDF didnt buy any since 1994. Makes me sick
If you think a few k $ stops those problems you clearly have never read the Mikrokopter forum!!! Remwmber, Arducopter is Beta, not release, and how many of those problems are user induced? The cost of these things does not define te quality...
The flight controller alone likely costs 10k or more. Add in the real IR camera (8k ish) the rugged tablet (3k), and the heli (800 to 1k depending on equipment), A good radio system(2-3k+) and you start getting closer and closer to that 50k mark.
Those $500 hammers we all hear about are modal hammers used to do system identification tests. They would cost you the same amount.
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