Fitting for drone!

Hexadrone  - "La boutique du drone" - unveiled its first serial drone, the Tundra, a ruggedized, multi-functional, modular drone that is to be industrially manufactured in a factory under construction in France. The Tundra uses ultra-rugged, miniature Fischer UltiMate™ and Fischer MiniMax™ connectivity solutions, able to withstand the harsh environments the drone may need to operate in.

Resulting from more than three years of development, the Tundra is the first French modular, multi-rotor drone. Designed in Hexadrone's workshops in the Haute-Loire in an open innovation logic, this collaborative tool carrier, in its beta version, won the prestigious Red Dot Design Award in 2018.

Unveiled on April 30, 2021 in its serial version, the Tundra is a unique 100% modular, multifunctional unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), designed and manufactured as a development hub for integrators. The body is equipped with numerous interfaces that allow the integration of accessories, sensors and other modules already available on the market, or the development of new ones. This enables the Tundra to adapt to custom features and rapid changes in the state of the art, which also helps it combat obsolescence. The drone's arms are interchangeable and easy to remove. The user can choose from three different types, depending on the various missions and flight scenarios planned. With the most durable arms, the Tundra can carry a payload of up to four kilos for a flight time of 30 minutes – a high performance in the world of multirotor drones.

Fischers UltiMate™Series
interface onTundra’s body.

The serial production of the Tundra, made possible thanks to the construction of an industrial building underway in Saint Ferréol d'Auroure in the Haute-Loire, is the logical next step in this drone’s development that meets the market needs analyzed by Alexandre Labesse, Hexadrone’s Chairman and Founder: "With this multifunctional, modular tool carrier, our customers are opening up the field of possibilities in their collaborative projects and lowering their development costs when they adapt the drone to users’ new needs and new technologies on the market. This is not possible with most of today's drones, which are designed for a single type of use and quickly become obsolete due to rapid technological advances. In response to obsolescence, we’ve opted for adaptability and durability."

The Tundra’s durability is ensured through a robust design that allows for intensive use in the field. The drone is waterproof and can cope with harsh conditions. Moreover, transportation and assembly in the field are easy, as the landing gear can be fitted and the arms screwed on in less than a minute.

Two types of robust, miniature connector for intensive, durable use To fulfill the drone's technical requirements for modularity, reliability, durability, ruggedness and ease of use, Hexadrone chose Fischer Connectors' high-performance, ultra-robust, push-pull connectivity solutions. The Tundra comes equipped with a rugged Fischer UltiMateTM USB 2.0 connector that is waterproof and reliable in all conditions. The standard interfaces can accommodate external modules linked, among others, by Fischer MiniMaxTM connectors and cabling, which optimize the high-density miniaturization of on-board electronics, such as a companion computer, a storage module, a security key or a lidar that the Tundra can be fitted with for certain aerial remote-sensing missions using lasers.

Guy Lacroix, Director of Fischer Connectors France, is very happy with the technological partnership established throughout this rugged drone’s development: "We’ve been supporting the Tundra's innovations from the outset. Our experts are gratified to have been able to see the project through to serial production with suitable connectivity solutions. Since connectivity lies at the heart of this rugged UAV, our high-performance solutions proposed in this modular offering cover the whole range of integrators’ technical requirements in terms of robustness and reliability, miniaturization, sealing up to IP68, and data transmission".

@FischerConnect #Connections #PAuto #Transportation #Drone

Drones!

Now that drones are being used more, either experimentally or more generally, in delivery services and other applications we thought this item might be of interest to our visitors.

IDTechEx’s recent market research report on Drones and their associated technologies predicts the drone market to be over $22Bn (€19bn) by 2041. The report “Drone Market and Industries 2021-2041” covers the key areas of the drone environment, such as the hardware, software and sensors which are critical to drone use cases and adoption. This article discusses the key areas of the drone market and drone design.

What are the main use cases for drones in 2030, 2040?
Who are the major players in the drone market?
What are the key drivers for market growth?
What is the projected revenue for the drones market from 2020 onwards?
What is the drone market segmentation?
What is the drone segmentation between consumer and commercial drones?

Drones have, once again, opened up the possibility of experimenting with the aerodynamic design of flying objects. The aircraft industry itself spent decades experimenting with the design of aircraft, both in civilian and military applications. Indeed, numerous technologies failed and some succeeded before the outlines of the general dominant designs emerged.

Drones have also represented an opportunity for novel designs: they are light-weight, battery-powered, and electrically-propelled. All these components can be arranged in many new novel ways, which in the past few years led to an explosion of designs. This report provides you with the insight and understanding to make insightful decisions about this key market area.

Different drones have different applications. Rotary drones are typically more efficient designs for smaller drone sizes. This is due to their design. With four fixed-pitch props, there are few moving parts and this reduces the cost of the drone. However, this design does not scale up very well.

Quadcopters require a stabilization for each of their motors in order to fly. In order for the drone to stay stable in the air, it needs to individually adjust the thrust in each of its props. As a quadcopter requires its motors to speed up or slow down to adjust the thrust, there needs to be a built-in time delay to how fast the drone can react, as it takes time to change the speed of the prop due to its inertia. So scaling the drone up to a larger size does not work, because the larger the propeller, the more energy it takes to change its speed. This either needs a drastic oversize of each motor, which would increase the weight, or have a slow dynamic response, which would impact handling.

As a result of this, fixed wing drones are typically used for longer distances, where less dynamic handling is required. Use cases include surveying or mapping, where the drone can follow a fixed path and map a large area whilst remaining in the VLOS of the drone pilot.

With different designs of drones, different use cases are more suited to them. The report provides  insight into the different applications for drone technologies. The use cases of agricultural, search and rescue, mapping and localization, delivery, and consumer drones are considered and analyzed with forecasts for both 2021-2031 and 2031-2041. It provides an understanding in each of these use case areas and their market predictions for the next two decades. 

One key area of importance is regulations for different use cases. For example, there are restrictions over where the drone can fly. It cannot fly in built-up areas, around airports (up to 5km) away, and similar urban situations. This limits applications such as drone delivery, as the drones will only be able to deliver to rural locations. Furthermore, privacy restrictions do not permit recordings over private property in some countries. This limits the use cases in delivery or infrastructure management for a domestic setting. The report covers the different country restrictions for drones, and summarizes the impact of these on the drone market in the future.

Drones sales revenue. Source: IDTechEx

@IDTechEx 

Controlling robots, drones, and more.

Mouser Electronics is now stocking the highly anticipated BeagleBone Blue from BeagleBoard, a complete robotics controller built around the BeagleBone open hardware single-board computer (SBC). The high-performance BeagleBone Blue combines flexible networking capabilities with a real-time-capable Linux system and easy-to-connect interfaces for building robots, machine control, or even unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones).

The BeagleBone Blue, available from Mouser Electronics, provides 4 GBytes of eMMC flash storage, microSD slot, a 3D graphics accelerator and a NEON floating-point. Like the BeagleBone Black Wireless, the BeagleBone Blue is built on the Octavo Systems OSD3358 system-in-package (SiP), which integrates a Texas Instruments (TI) AM3358 1GHz ARM^® Cortex^®-A8 processor, 512 MBytes of DDR3 SDRAM, and two 32-bit programmable realtime units (PRUs) for fast peripheral control. The Octavo chip also includes a TI TPS65217C power management IC (PMIC), TI TL5209 low dropout (LDO) voltage regulator, and over 140 passive components, which opens up board space for BeagleBone Blue's many connectivity and sensor features.

The BeagleBone Blue features high-speed USB 2.0 host and client and a TI WiLink 8 module, which provides support for 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth^® 4.1, and Bluetooth low energy. In addition to two sensors — a 9-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a barometer — the board includes four DC motor drivers and eight server motor outputs, as well as four quadrature encoder inputs for speed and direction measurements. For additional connectivity, the board provides eight general purpose inputs and outputs (GPIOs) and CAN, UART, SPI, and I2C interfaces.

The BeagleBone Blue is powered via the microUSB port, 9V — 18VDC barrel jack, or a two-cell lithium polymer battery connector with cell balancer. The board ships with Linux and BeagleBoard's Cloud9 integrated development environment (IDE) on the eMMC, and also supports Debian and other distributions of Linux; Ardupilot platform for UAVs; and ROS operating system for robots.

@MouserElecEU #Pauto #Robotics @beagleboardorg