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The bi-annual Farnborough International Airshow wrapped up a couple weeks ago. I've lost track of how many MicroPilot has attended. It’s certainly more than 15 years since we attended Farnborough for the first time. The highlight of the flight demonstration portion of this year's show was a loop by a C-130 Hercules. This certainly upstaged …
RF is your enemy. Both your GPS receiver and your datalink are sensitive to RF interference. RF interference will increase the time it takes for your GPS receiver to lock, increase the likelihood that you lose lock and reduce your GPS receiver’s position accuracy. Note that RTK (or carrier phase) GPS receivers are especially sensitive …
It seems that everyone is working on some sort of transitioning UAV these days. Combining a fixed wing aircraft and some sort of multirotor seems to be the thing to do. The resulting vehicle combines the multirotor’s ease of takeoff and landing with most of the speed and endurance of a fixed wing UAV. There …
Continue reading "Transitioning Vehicles – Looks Can be Deceiving"
Understand your failure modes and corner cases. We often see drones designed with too little attention paid to failure modes and corner cases. It's hard to cover all the ‘what ifs’ but once your system is in the market, how well you cover all the exception cases will play a large role in determining your …
AUVSI's XPONENTIAL 2018 has come to a close. This show is certainly the most important UAV and drone trade show of the year. All others are at best a distant second place and at worst not even worth walking. There were 670 exhibitors at this year's show, which is almost identical to the past two …
Flex is your enemy. It's important that your drone's airframe is rigid. The motors on a drone are very powerful with very fast response times. An airframe that isn't stiff enough will allow its arms to flex, which in turn changes the orientation of the motors. This makes control more difficult and it will increase …
There is an odd museum just off the autobahn between Frankfurt and Stuttgart. Normally, museums have a curated feel about them; this one feels more like a bunch of stuff. There's a Stuka dive bomber sitting next to a giant pipe organ. There is this bizarre frankencar named Brutus, created by dropping a massive 46-liter …
The Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver on board any drone is a critical part of the systems that allow a drone to fly. Only the very simplest of drones don't include a GPS receiver. All drones rely heavily on their on-board GPS receiver to determine their location. Without a GPS receiver, features such as …
There is still some controversy about the threat represented by a collision between a drone and an aircraft. There have been a number of these collisions reported in the media, and although some turned out to be bird strikes, some are real done collisions. I believe the researchers investigating drone / plane collisions can tell …
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