recovering

Geo Sense glider UAV is recovering manually by landing or hitting on the net. In order to minimize the impact, the RC pilot needs to minimize the speed and also to make sure the airframe is bulleyed to the net. Any side hit and miss hit will cause bad impact to the airframe such as cracking and even damaging to internal electronic components.

The airframe is fiberglass based top model elantra pro, high efficient glider with very good penetration. The down side is limited fuselage space to accomodate the batteries and various flight chipset modules. Thus we need to tightly push all component at every pre-flight installation. This cause risk in loose in connectors' joints etc.

Due to our urban flight mission, the UAV have to land in a very tight space, thus inviting high landing risks. In many instances the UAV had to land in high speed, which in long run create cracking to the airframe body. Below is what happen to us after 50 missions and more than 300 km endurance, pretty nasty pictures. The fuselage was break into 2 during our landing in Kemas area
View Larger Map

This bad timing to our mission, which we already facing unusual raining season and also the near deadline.

Lucky, early on we managed to outsource the same airframe as the spare part item. The plan is to transfer the whole electronic components to the new airframe, this include the GPS system which failed at 2 occasions and very much worrying the team. We have 2 days to study the existing broken connectivity and install to the new airframe, which give us 50/50 success rate.

So we sacrified our weekend and we got our new airframe installed with flight components, autonomious system and also some adjustment from our learning curve. This is all about progressive elaboration to the team, and on Sunday afternoon we got the new airframe and quite successful test flight. There some minor hiccups here and there but we got over them as the team and determination. Below is picture of 2 UAV airframes, the one with blue cap is the new one and the left is old one in restoration process.