At the moment, I am trying to decide what is the most interesting way to proceed with this blog. It is important to discuss some of the howto aspects of UAVs and autopilots. I think that it is also important to speak about some of the interesting applications and business difficulties of it as well.
At the moment, there are many stories in the news about blowing up bad guys with thunder bolts from the sky. However, I think that this is not the most interesting thing to be done with the technologies. We are investigating a number of small-scale recycled materials and techniques to apply energy reclamation systems so that the uavs harvest as much of their energy from the environment and recycle as much as they can.
For the record, the soybean epoxies available are just not as good as their petro-chemical equivalents. We are still trying to use them in our skin layups. If we can make use of them, they do come from a renewable resource stream. These adhesives are not recyclable though.
Another big idea, that Buzz Labs is working on is the heat pipe system to pull heat away from the motors and batteries and either use that to generate trickle charges or to be able to cool the batteries to a point that we can keep their chemistries from over heating down to the limit of their endurance. Lithium-polymer (LiPo) batteries do have some physical limitations that make exciting failures possible. Read about the exploding notebook batteries. Buzz's engineers are seeing some success with maintaining battery temperatures even above their rated currents. Battery performance increases are especially good news for the racers and autonomous vehicle systems
We will keep you posted here as we make significant breakthroughs or cool flaming rc parts.
Buzz Labs' unmanned vehicle blog and cool DIY remote controlled stuff blog. For techies by techies, maybe also some interesting tidbits about small business and international business.
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