First drones appeared in the industry were fixed-wing aircrafts or, simply speaking, airplanes. Whenever someone needs simplicity, the lowest cost and longest range, endurance, the highest speed and highest possible payloads – fixed-wing drones are the answer. Current fixed-wing drone applications include surveillance, reconnaissance, large area patrol, remote areas inspections, photogrammetry, and many more. There are two factors, which really limit the use of this type of drones: it requires runways or bulky launch/recovery devices to operate, and it can’t hover or fly at low speed. There are hundreds of fixed-wing drone vendors on the market offering aircraft for virtually any mission.
VTOL aircraft was invented to enable fixed-wing aircrafts to take off without using runway or launch device. Originally designed as airplane with rotating engines and/or wings, which can lift airplane vertically, today VTOL drones are mostly hybrids of airplane and quadcopters, having aerodynamically optimized quadcopter frame embedded into the design of usually high aspect ratio wing airplane. Such design reduces flying capacity of the fixed-wing aircraft, but adds vertical take-off/landing and some hovering functionality at the cost of reduced payloads and shorter endurance time. Most of the VTOL drones today offer 1-2 kg payload carrying capacity with endurance time of 1-2 hours, in case of an electric drivetrain, or up to 6-8 hours when being gas powered. Other sizes proved to be technically complex, unreliable and inefficient, giving no benefits compared to the other types of aircraft.
Quadcopters were invented in the 1920s to resolve persistent problems with vertical flight. The overall design was technically simple and attractive, and quadcopters were the first heavier-than-air vertical flight aircrafts to take off. However, due to natural aerodynamic instability those days, they were almost impossible to operate by pilots, plus they required independent torque control for each rotor, which wasn’t technically viable in the beginning of the 20th century. With an advent of microelectronics, power semiconductors, MEMS devices, Li-ion batteries and strong magnets quad- and multi-copters became incredibly popular, since torque control, stability and mechanical complexity challenges are addressed. Today, when people talk about drones, they usually assume quad- and multi-copters. These flying machines come in thousands of varieties, sizes, with every imaginable payload. The main benefits are VTOL and hovering, simplicity of the machines, and possibility to build them even by non-skilled technicians or amateurs. The main drawback, due to aerodynamic instability and relatively small propellers, is short flying time, usually in the range of about 20-30 minutes for bigger drones and much less for smaller ones. There are thousands of manufacturers on the market, with DJI being almost absolute leader on consumer and industrial markets.
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Autonomous drone unit equipped with a drone charging station (drone box) is good for regular video monitoring and rescue kit delivery as a hangar protects the drone from severe weather, while a charging station can bedeployed at any place along the road. Additionally, it is equipped with a weather station and automatic take-off and landing system. Flight time of such drone is up to 40 minutes.
A portable tethered drone can be a part of a police car to cover area up to 30 km with an altitude up to 100 meters. Drone is deployed in 15 minutes and can hover up to8 hours and film on a Full HD camera with x30 zoom, as well as in IR.
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