Its interesting that they are doing cool things but not quite breaking out commercially
But the other side of the coin is lots of money is being thrown at UAS in Europe and America really is beginning to fall behind.
Maybe ETH will put out their own or an enhanced opensource AP one day
Comments
Ahh...... 10K for autonomous foam wing ? Seriously? Us UAV nuts can do so much better for that price tag!
MarcS I agree. For example a mapping project requires aerial data acquisition, ground control surveys and data processing. Of all of these steps the briefest is taking the photos and with fairly low rates in the developed world for hiring a full scale it is hard to justify a UAV. In the developing world though where light aircraft are less available and where projects with no commercial gain (eg water resources vs oil & gas) then they are ideal.
afaik, ( read huge disclaimer :- all my understanding is theortical) from what i gather this should be achievable on APM once we progress a bit more. I guess challenge would be having enough of power on CPU to spare to do all the extra computation needed to do flock guidance. BTW does anyone know is this a sort of mesh network (robust) that is being used to communicate between these nodes ?
I like how they shake them to activate them... I'll be surprised if the Ardupilot doesn't have the multi-vehicle coordination abilities shown in that video in its standard code base this time next year.
Greetings,
In the US, price is not the problem, it is regulation. There are plenty of entrepreneurs and established business that would invest in sUAS in a heartbeat if there was profit to be made. But there is little point in investing $10K - $50K if you'll only be able to use the aircraft as a toy.
There are more enough existing applications for sUAS to justify new, more flexible regulations. Just look to Canada and Australia for examples.
-David
I think we know the problems of using sUAS commercially...
Usability (regulations), reliability/robustness/ease of use, and finally, the price!! The cost of the end product (in this case 3D data) has to be 1.lower then the benefit and 2.cheaper then competitors (e.g. manned AC).
Combined this is true for a very limited number of civil applications right now. So most things we see is research, because there the benefits of using UAS are much bigger.
In fact we need new ideas for applications that can only be done with UAS and everybody wants it :-)
History repeats itself. America had little interest in turbine engines or rockets while Germany surged ahead.
If you don´t see the sky plenty of fliying sensors, that means the business is in its alpha step.
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next