Exploring Various Drone Type and Uses in This World

In 1935, the first commonly drone type and uses appeared in 1935 as a full-size re-equipment of the Queen Bee de Havilland DH82B biplane. In the back seat, it is equipped with servo operated control and radio, actually, from the front seat, it can be piloted conventionally.

But generally, it flew unmanned and in training, it was shot by artillery gunners. From this early usage, the term drone comes as a result of a play on the Queen Bee nomenclature. UAV technology continues to be in demand with the military. 

In the world drone, multi-rotors is the most popular and get most of the attention, but there is still many choices. If you choose a fixed-wing-aircraft because you are serious about aerial mapping, it is the right choice. Not only that, another great solution is single-rotor helis and other types. 

The Popular Drone Type and Uses, Multi-Rotor Drone

If you want to display a small camera for a short time, the multi-rotor is the cheapest and easiest option to get an eye to the sky and because they give you much control over framing and position, for photography work, they are perfect.

The limited speed and endurance is the downside of the multi-rotors, making it unsuitable for aerial mapping in a large-scale, long-distance inspection, and long endurance monitoring such as power lines, roads, and pipelines. 

Multi-rotor is requires a lot of energy and inherently very inefficient just to keep them in the air and fight gravity, although technology growing faster all the time and there are lots of new discoveries. They only can fly around 20 until 30 minutes if carrying a lightweight camera payload. 

It is because they are using current battery technology. More loads can be carried by the heavy lifting multi-rotors, but, as the result, the flight time is much shorter, so they are limited to electric motors. 

Due to the need for high-precision and fast throttle changes so that it can be kept stable, to drive the multi-rotors using a gas engine is impractical. We only can expect the flight time in very small gain until the arrival of a new power source.

Fixed Wing Drones 

This drone type and uses is opposed to swivel wings. Rather than the vertical rotor, they provide the lift by using a wing like a normal airplane. To move forward, they only need to use energy because of this, they don’t hold back in the air, so it is much more efficient.

They can reach a longer distance, mapped out a much larger area, and take a long walk to monitor their interest point. They can use gas power source and can last for 16 hours or more because of its energy density is greater than the fuel of many fixed-wing UAVs.

This fixed-wing has the main downside. They cannot hover in one place that makes their landing and launching a lot complicated. To get them into the air, you need a catapult, net, parachute, or runway depending on the size to restore them safely at the end. 

Another consideration of this type is it not just about taking great pictures, but also about the data. Usually, you get the job done with a multi-rotor session when the flight is over, you just have to submit imagery.

With fixed-wing jobs, aviation is only the beginning, you have taken the picture, but that is not the data clients are looking for yet. Through first stage processing, the image is fed to combine hundreds of separate images into one large tile image.

This type can do more work in performing data analysis like overlay other data onto the map, tree counts, stockpile volume calculation, and so on. Lastly, the big challenge when operating this fixed-wing is the wedge-tailed eagles.

Single-Rotor Drone

Over a multi-rotor, this single rotor has greater efficiency. And they can use a gas motor as the power although, for longer endurance, this is aerodynamics’ general rule that the more efficient will be got if there are the slower pins and larger rotor blade. 

There are many different rotors in multi-rotor to hold it up, but, a single-rotor just has one and also a tail rotor so that it can be controlled. In manned aviation, the helicopter is very popular. But, it only fills a small niche currently in the drone world.

A single-rotor heli can be your best bet if you need a heavy load for a flight, for example, to carry an aerial LIDAR laser scanner or have a mix of fast forward flight or long endurance hovering.

The cost, vibration, their large spinning blades that can be dangerous, and also their complexity. Are the downside. Serious damage can occur because of the long sharp blade and there is several casualties from the drone helicopter and the hobby RC.

In case of difficulty, a single-rotor is placed between the fixed-wing aircraft and the multi-rotor. They can hover the spot on one hand, so it is possible to start easily and increase them but they are unstable in case of a bad landing.

Fixed-wing Hybrid VTOL Drone

Merging the excellence of the ability to hover and fixed-wing UAVS resulting in a new hybrid that can laid vertically and can also take off. Under development, there are various types and some of them are just existing fixed-wing designs with bolted vertical lift motors.

It has a tail sitter feature that looks like a normal airplane but has its tail on the ground. Before flying normally, it pointing straight for takeoff. Or another type tilt-rotor type where the entire wing or just the rotor with the attached propeller can rotate.

For the forward flight, it rotates pointing horizontally and for takeoff, it rotates pointing up. In 1950, these configurations were tried for manned aircraft, but they proved too difficult and complex to fly, with some devastating results.

With the advent of gyros, modern autopilots, and accelerometers, this kind of bizarre suddenly is possible because it can be kept stable by the work of the autopilot. They become easier to be guided around the sky.

There are only a few hybrid fixed-wing aircraft that can be found easily on the market. But no worry, in the coming years, this can be expected to be a much popular choice due to its refined technology and there will be more various drone type and uses. 

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