The magic of a bird's flight is truly amazing and awe inspiring,
their bird eye view of the world from above is similar to that of our
UAV live stream video and UAV Photography. It is made possible by the
design of the bird's wings, feathers, the skeleton structure and their
desire to fly. The flight technique of a bird may be gliding, soaring,
flapping its wings while being stationery, braking or taking off from
the land or water. The most majestic large birds of the sky may be:
Golden Eagles (wingspan 2.5 meters), Grey Crowned Crane (2.5 meter wing
span), California condor (2.8 meters), or the Wandering Albatross (3.6
meter wing span). It is truly awesome experience to encounter such a
majestic bird in the wild, at relatively close distance.
I think
that the greatest design inspiration and most reverse engineering study
done from natural designs has been from the flight of birds and their
natural technique to fly, their feather covered wing designs. After all
they do it so efficiently with grace, with such a small amounts of
energy needed making use of the available air currents and updraft.
Their feather wing designs are light, body fat is low, and their bones
are hollow.
UAV photography captures some of that freedom that
birds experience, it is a three dimensional freedom to move on land, on
water and thorough the air. The new innovative technology is more
affordable for hobbyist to practice UAV photography; it is much more
energy efficient that real planes or real size helicopters. What is most
exciting is that a live digital video camera can be attached to the UAV
drone that can be controlled from the ground. The camera can be
independently controlled and set to a GPS determined direction keeping
the camera focused on target despite whether the drone is pitching
(tilting), turning, ascending or descending, it creates a smoother
stream for video viewing.
Drone with a camera.
Video
camera mounted UAV is on the ground ready for takeoff, the motors are
running at low revs, the camera is switched on and the video view shows
the concrete and the green grass of the cricket pitch. The revs are
increased and the audio sound of the rotors and propellers working gets
louder, suddenly the Drone takes off the ground and climbs up and up to
about 100 feet (30 meters) directly above, as it climbed the video shows
an operator of the drone standing near a concrete cricket pitch, and
the person and the cricket pitch is getting smaller and smaller as the
distance increases. The operator of the drone moves the flight controls
to send the drone some 30 feet to the north, the GPS knows where that is
and the drone obeys the command of the flight control. It is now
located 30 feet north of the position that it launched from, the pilot
then sets the flight controls so that the drone will fly in a 60 feet
radius around and above the launch site, above the pilot. The camera has
a fix on the pilot and it is recording that target as the drone flies
around above the cricket field. Without smart technology and GPS system
software this would not be possible, this is what makes the UAV
Photography so much easier to use and so much better in the video view
quality.
What types of UAV designs are there?
There
are many, but the most common ones for the hobbyist are three:
helicopters, multi propeller helicopters (3-8), gliders with and a
propeller engine and single wing designs. In the military type
applications there are 45 countries according to Wikipedia that have
designed their own version of UAV, from Argentina to Vietnam. The new
digital technologies have made it so much more cost efficient to put a
camera up in the sky to view what is going on at any time for whatever
reason; it may be natural disasters, earthquakes, and drought, flooding
or bush fires. Police forces use them equipped with; single image, video
and heat sensing cameras, they make searching so much easier in the
dark of night. The high performance UAV drones that the police, rescue
operations and military use are not available for civilian use, they are
very serious UAV drones that can fly long distances at high altitudes
remotely controlled via live video streaming and pre programmed GPS
flight controls using online Google maps.