[ahmedrehan]

I am designing a new mini electric UAV with following features.

1. Wing Span 9ft
2. Brushless motor
3. Gps Autopilot control
4. Mini camera with video TX
5. Radio Modem
6. 5-10km radius operation

Ahmed

[ahmedrehan]

Here are few pictures

Ahmed

[rippersoft]

Looks and sounds very similar to the Iranian effort. Small metal parts and hard to track. Very dangerous. However, the radio modem is trackable.

RipperSoftware
Former Navy Guide Missile technician.

[unterhaus]

Before we get excited about UAV's, let's worry about things that are about 27 times as dangerous: people, cars, manned air vehicles, trucks, coke and Mentos, &etc. His payload is probably 1/2 pound or less with a range of a few miles at most. You just can't do anything dangerous with such an air vehicle.

I don't see why Pakistanis don't get to do things to defend themselves anyway. They are nominally our allies last I checked.

[blfinche]

Can you tell us a little about the construction. It looks like a foam wing? Is the body fiberglass?

Bobby

[rippersoft]

Before we get excited about UAV's, let's worry about things that are about 27 times as dangerous: people, cars, manned air vehicles, trucks, coke and Mentos, &etc. His payload is probably 1/2 pound or less with a range of a few miles at most. You just can't do anything dangerous with such an air vehicle.

I don't see why Pakistanis don't get to do things to defend themselves anyway. They are nominally our allies last I checked.

Then he should ID himself as Pakistani military or special government operations. The average everyday American RC enthusiast does not build UAVs with GPS autopilot and camera transmitters for fun.

If you know the position of a group of people based on a UAV observation, you can call in a strike or move troops to the site. Our troops do this in the mountains of Afganistan. That happens to border with Pakistan.:nono:

[ahmedrehan]

Can you tell us a little about the construction. It looks like a foam wing? Is the body fiberglass?

Bobby

Body is fiber Glass with carbon fiber reinforcement ans removable nose for pay load.
Wing is foam covered with Balsa and then hollow again covered with covering.
wing is in 3 parts.
Tail is built up.

Ahmed

[ahmedrehan]

Then he should ID himself as Pakistani military or special government operations. The average everyday American RC enthusiast does not build UAVs with GPS autopilot and camera transmitters for fun.

If you know the position of a group of people based on a UAV observation, you can call in a strike or move troops to the site. Our troops do this in the mountains of Afganistan. That happens to border with Pakistan.:nono:

Well in US i have seen lot of projects like this mostly done by hobbyist and you can find off the shelf component in USA.
My idea is to develop low cost solution for security application.

Ahmed

[daedalus]

you might want to include an inertial measurement system, a set of gyros and accellerometers which when used with proper filtering can give you a reasonably stable orientation and position. IIRC you can use kalman filters to incorporate low frequency dgps updates into these predictions.

Doing so has the advantage that you have high frequency updates of your orientation, which you just cant get from gps. Also if for some reason gps fails then you still have dead reckoning to fall back on.

The accelerometers and gyros can be found as mems devices, so are very small and light.

The challenge will be getting enough computing power onto such a small and light platform.

check this guys site, he has some useful info on video signal range, and gyro based control.

http://www.ukrocketman.com/digital/index.shtml

[unterhaus]

lots of people build uavs for a hobby, and there are a large number of universities and companies doing the same. You can buy a controller for a uav for $300 from sparkfun.com
If you are just worried about spotting, it can be done with a regular RC plane and there are a very large number of people doing aerial photography with RC planes.

Some people are afraid of their own shadow.

[musicmkr]

The average everyday American RC enthusiast does not build UAVs with GPS autopilot and camera transmitters for fun.

I've been working on a similar project for a while now. The final goal is aerial photography; however it is essentially just for fun.

Some people collect stamps for a hobby, I build machines.

Ahmed, the plane looks great!

Ryan