Spaced Out ::

The UAV market continues to develop at a pace. The Aeyron Scout as an example of a neat quadcopter design for military and security applications. It is fully programmable as well as manually controllable using a tablet PC. The camera is their own design and is specced at 5MP stills, upto 1/1000s and real-time MPEG-4 compressed video (640 x 480) all on a gimballed mount. And the amazing bit: 112g.

And the UAV part is equally interesting: 3 km range, 20 min duration, 36 kmh, 500m altitude and 1kg weight. It uses wireless modem of wifi for communication and is DGPS/WAAS capable. The comms are needed for security, but it would be interesting to know what bandwidth it needs and how much on-board storage there is. Wifi range has to be quite limited. The DGPS is an interesting option and again it would be interesting to know what chipset this is and how they intend it to be used (and, as a result, the levels of accuracy you can expect to get).