In a barn lost in the countryside of New Hampshire \u2013 land of farms, freedom and open-mindedness – BirdsEyeView mates wings with hexacopters. What kind of offspring do they get? A VTOL, the FireFLY6.<\/p>\n
What’s a VTOL? It is a hybrid UAV, a chimera, which takes off and lands vertically (Vertical Take-Off And Landing), and which is usually controlled in flight like a typical flying wing – the best of both worlds.<\/p>\n
At BirdsEyeView, it took almost two years and 30 iterations for a small group of aeronautical engineers to give birth to an affordable and reliable flying robot. But even after making the hybrid fly, the hardest puzzle was still to solve: the quest was still on for a smooth transition between hover and horizontal flight – or, more precisely, they needed to find a way to avoid self-destruction in flight!<\/p>\n
And that is the milestone that the team announced a few weeks ago: AVA, Advanced VTOL Autonomy. It’s a powerful and reliable flight control script for FireFLY6 that can change flight type autonomously, in the middle of a mission. The system allows the UAV to stop and hover in the middle of a 100-km\/h flight, take a picture, then resume its course. The potential is huge – surveillance, herd monitoring, sports video, you name it.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in the VTOL universe, Sony announced earlier this year its participation in the race to manufacture this type of hybrid UAV. With such a huge player, can we expect the VTOL to be a viable option in commercial operations?<\/p>\n
Controlled by 3DRobotics’ Pixhawk<\/a>, the FireFLY, with a one-and-a-half-meter wingspan, offers 45 minutes of autonomy with a load of about 500g (the weight of a mirrorless camera).<\/p>\n With information from: BirdsEyeView<\/a><\/p>\n