Solar Powered Small UAV

About

Problem statement: The low endurance of present day man portable drones is a major bottleneck for their rapid adoption in numerous potential use cases. Today’s drone operations are carried out in a piecemeal manner due to the requirement for frequent battery changing, leading to high downtime and choppy missions. Many large and challenging mission statements relating to persistent surveillance, large scale remote sensing and long distance inspections cannot be addressed.   Solution: We are offering solar powered man portable UAVs which can fly for extended period of time during the day (around 10 hours). The main USP of our technology is ultra-high efficiency (>30%) thin flexible solar cells based on III-V semiconductor technology. Our cells are specifically optimised for superior performance in high air mass numbers (which are typical to operating conditions for small drones majority of the time). This allows for better energy harvesting in limited surface area as compared to any other technology. A proprietary anti reflective coating technology will also be applied to further increase energy harvesting. As a result, sufficient power can be generated on-board such that some of the battery weight can be substituted for payload capacity and still the drone will fly for majority portion of the day. Our technology will facilitate the increase in endurance of small fixed wing UAVs by around 600%+ as compared to present day and will allow them to fly for extended durations of around 10 hours or more. This is a leapfrog improvement over typical present day commercial man portable drones which have severely limited endurance of 1-2 hours. Our solution is a cost-effective approach and will result in reduction of cost/kg/hour metric of a drone by up to 80%. Dramatic reduction in down-time, persistent daytime operations, feasibility of carrying out large and challenging mission statements, reduction in unit cost of aerial data acquisition are some of the key benefits while our cost effectiveness is a critical enabler. Our solution is cost effective such that the cost of solar integration can be less than 25% (or even lesser) than the price of normal fixed wing drone. We are thus offering the lowest cost/kg/hour metric as compared to any other prevalent small UAV. Our future pathway is to develop the technology for a practical solution to achieve repetitive overnight operations. While the solar cell technology is already validated and prototyped, Airpix is currently developing integration solutions and power management systems.