discussion / Drones  / 24 February 2016

What to you is the biggest small problem with using UAVs in the field?

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With the way UAVs are designed now, there are large issues with things such as range, battery life and flight time. I'm curious, what is a small problem that should be readily fixed that causes the biggest headache when you are using UAVs?




I can't really comment as I only have experience of my son's toy quadcopters, but the short battery life of quadcopters always makes me think "I want to build a dirigible airship drone".  Wouldn't than be great?  It could just stay up there for days.  They must exist already, surely?

I've seen one used at the Mozilla Festival, but only indoors – outside they'd be blown away in anything over a light gust of wind!

Other issues(maybe not small problems):

  1. Goverment regulations: Even if the technical challenges are solved, a majority of countries heavily restrict UAS use.  Hopefully this will change in the near future.  This is one of the biggest hurdles when using UAS for conservation.
  2. Quality of Sensors/Data:  Making a plane or multirotor fly autonomously is easy today.  However, development effort needs to be put into sensors for integration onto an UAS.  On board computing is key for image based systems, this helps with line of site issues or link quality.  Miniturization of sensors and making them more cost effective.  We should start some open source projects on WILDLABS!
  3. User friendly:  Multirotors are becoming easier to fly.  For example, almost anyone can fly a DJI phantom.  The same level of ease of use needs to be applied to fixed wing platforms.  With Pixhawk or APM, some software people need to make an easy to use interface and controller(another project). 

A few comments..

Better range can be acheived by using tracking/directional antennas.  There are a few open source projects which address this.  If you use Pixhawk, APM autopilots, or an autopilot which supports MAVLink you can use something similiar to this:

http://ardupilot.org/plane/docs/common-antenna-tracking.html

If anyone needs help identifying a data link let me know. 

Someone needs to develop a new power solution which would solve all of our problems and make them very wealthy...