Autel Robotics Dragonfish VTOL Drone With a Range of 30 Km

Introduction

Autel Robot­ics Drag­on­fish VTOL was first intro­duced at CES 2017 as a pro­to­type and has been slow­ly devel­oped over the past three years. Drag­on­fish is now avail­able on the Autel web­site with a max­i­mum flight time of 120 min­utes and a video stream­ing range of up to 30 km.

Key Features

Autel Robot­ics adver­tis­es Drag­on­fish with the slo­gan “Break­ing tra­di­tion, com­mand­ing the future.” The Drag­on­fish is claimed to have a max­i­mum flight time of 120 min­utes, a video trans­mis­sion range of 30 km, and the abil­i­ty to take to the air in less than 4 min­utes. The drone boasts three inter­change­able cam­eras, includ­ing a 4K cam­era with 20x opti­cal zoom, a hybrid 4K cam­era with ther­mal imager, and a mul­ti-spec­tral RGB cam­era with infrared detec­tion up to 2000 meters.

Drag­on­fish has a max­i­mum flight speed of 108 km/h and is capa­ble of fly­ing in wind speeds up to 14 m/s. The max­i­mum take­off weight of the drone is 7.8 kg, of which 1.5 kg is reserved for pay­load. And also, thanks to two dupli­cat­ing RTK mod­ules, Drag­on­fish pro­vides an accu­ra­cy of up to one cen­time­ter with a mea­sure­ment error of one mil­lionth, which can sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve the qual­i­ty of the meta­da­ta of the result­ing images for pho­togram­me­try, as well as improve the accu­ra­cy and safe­ty of the flight as a whole.

Specification

Max. flight time (with stan­dard pay­load):

120 min

Max. FPV Removal Dis­tance:

30 km

Max. flight speed:

108 km/h

Degree of pro­tec­tion:

IP43

Wind resis­tance lev­el:

6

Slave. tem­per­a­ture range:

-20 ~ 55°C

High­est tran­si­tion height:

4500 m

Max. ceil­ing above sea lev­el:

6000 m

Max. pay­load:

1.5 kg

Posi­tion­ing Accu­ra­cy:

1 cm + 1 ppm

Assem­bled and ready to fly:

5 min­utes

Intelligence and autonomy

The big advan­tage of this drone is its intel­li­gence and autonomous capa­bil­i­ties. Drag­on­fish can com­plete a mis­sion and auto­mat­i­cal­ly return home, track vehi­cles, cir­cle over a select­ed object, fly at a con­stant alti­tude above the ground, and com­plete mul­ti-point mis­sions. All this is pos­si­ble thanks to advanced algo­rithms that con­trol the drone and make it eas­i­er for the user to con­trol it.

Takeoff and landing with one button

Adaptive ground tracking

Advanced Mission Planning

point of interest

Intelligent tracking of moving targets

Security and redundancy

Look­ing at the image below, you can see that Autel puts a lot of empha­sis on secu­ri­ty and redun­dant sys­tems to make Drag­on­fish as secure as pos­si­ble. Drag­on­fish has two bat­ter­ies, IMUs, barom­e­ters, com­pass­es, and GPS RTK mod­ules in case one of them fails, thus allow­ing a back­up device to come back online imme­di­ate­ly after the first fails. If the air­craft detects that it is about to stall or is unable to con­tin­ue fly­ing in the cur­rent mode, it will switch to motor mode, in which the pro­pellers will take a ver­ti­cal posi­tion, sim­u­lat­ing a quad­copter.

The con­di­tion of the fuse­lage sur­faces and its ele­ments is mon­i­tored via a CAN bus with dou­ble redun­dan­cy in case one con­nec­tion fails. The drone also uses AI to con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tor the health of its sys­tems through­out the flight in order to detect mal­func­tions before they occur.

Interchangeable payload system

Drag­on­fish cur­rent­ly has three pay­load pro­pos­als ready:

1. Cam­era with two 4K sen­sors, where one of which acts as a 4K cam­era with 20x opti­cal zoom, and the oth­er as a 48-megapix­el wide-angle cam­era.
2. A cam­era with three sen­sors, where one of which acts as a 4K cam­era with 20x opti­cal zoom, the sec­ond as a 48-megapix­el wide-angle cam­era, and the third matrix as a ther­mal imag­ing cam­era.
3. 48-megapix­el wide-angle mul­ti­spec­tral RGB cam­era with five 2‑megapixel mul­ti­spec­tral sen­sors capa­ble of infrared detec­tion of objects up to 2000 meters away.

It also sup­ports third-par­ty pay­loads.

Control

To con­trol the Drag­on­fish, Autel Robot­ics has devel­oped a ground sta­tion with a 9.7‑inch 1000 nit dis­play, for which Autel Voy­ager soft­ware has also been devel­oped, capa­ble of advanced mis­sion plan­ning, intel­li­gent track­ing, flight his­to­ry track­ing and oth­er autonomous func­tions. The sta­tion pro­vides the stat­ed drone removal dis­tance in FPV mode — 30 kilo­me­ters.

Application

The drone from Autel Robot­ics is focused on appli­ca­tions in such areas of human activ­i­ty as pub­lic safe­ty, fire fight­ing, ener­gy, traf­fic con­trol, agri­cul­ture and mon­i­tor­ing.