Nowadays, small sized drones are the most common in the market, despite their limitations for many applications due to their low autonomy and payload capacity. Nevertheless, large helicopter drones have higher autonomy (more than ten hours), their payload capacity is over one hundred kilos and their maximum altitude goes beyond thousands of feet, as well as they are capable to have a datalink range over thousands of kilometers.

Commercial applications for large helicopter drones

The described features permit helicopter drones to perform professional tasks with high productivity, increasing the performance in many industrial applications and services while keeping a high reliability level.

• Agriculture: Due to the high payload capacity of large helicopter drones, they can perform spraying missions on big crop fields, neutralizing pests in affected areas without risking the operator’s health nor damaging the terrain nor plants.
• Delivery and transportation: The use of helicopter drones permits to perform these tasks faster than traditional delivery services, which permits to decrease costs up to 40%, as well as it allows accessing to poor accessibility areas, landing or releasing the payload with a precision parachute, bearing in mind that they can carry hundreds of kilos.
• Surveillance: Large helicopter drones can perform surveillance missions for many hours due to their capacity to carry a big quantity of fuel to maximize their autonomy.
• Search & Rescue and provisioning: With this kind of drones, it is possible to quickly reach areas where they are needed such as a battlefield, in order to, for instance, transporting big payloads, from food to ammo or weapons. Afterwards these drones would take wounded people from that battlefield into safe areas. Some months ago it was presented a large helicopter drone with these capacities in Israel; in the following video you can watch the demonstration flight.

Veronte Autopilot in large helicopter drones

Veronte Autopilot, a high reliability avionics system, is not limited to small UAVs but it is compatible with any drone with no size restrictions. Veronte is capable of controlling any helicopter drone configuration due to its flexibility in flight phases and control channels.

Veronte Autopilot supports control for OPVs and manned helicopters adapted to be unmanned. Drone helicopter configurations compatibility includes the standard one, tandem rotors, intermeshing rotors, hybrid VTOL-fixed wing and much more. Veronte Autopilot gets in all of them a high precision route control and hover position. Besides, its adaptive control permits to automatically adjust the system controller, working in an optimal regime according to the transported payload with no precision loss, even when its weight greatly changes. In addition, Veronte Autopilot takes control of every flight aspect, so it does not need a “governor” for the propeller rpm control.