Autonomous Aerial Systems: Heavy-Lift, High-Altitude and Survey

The mandate

I have designed, built and flown drones since 2016, not as a hobby but as a series of real missions with real payloads and real constraints. The through-line is engineering a platform that survives the field: heavy loads, thin air, long range and results a government or a scientific program will actually use.

The missions

• Heavy-lift Falcon platform. A drone built to carry roughly 15 kg of payload, which completed a 46 km flight carrying a 10 kg load. Range and lift together, which is the hard combination.
• High-altitude trials, Siachen. Flown in Himalayan conditions to a maximum altitude of about 14,500 ft, where thin air punishes every assumption a lowland design makes.
• Nation-scale land survey. Piloted a land-revenue survey program for the Andhra Pradesh government, mapping 25 villages across roughly 600 sq km in three days, work that would take ground teams far longer.
• Ecological survey. Built my first drone in 2016 for ecological studies in collaboration with the Australian government's maritime department.

Why this is hard

• Payload versus range. Lift costs energy and energy costs range. Carrying 10 kg for 46 km is a design compromise won at the airframe, propulsion and power level, not bought off a shelf.
• Altitude. At 14,500 ft the air that provides lift and cooling is thin. A platform that flies at sea level is a different machine in the Himalayas.
• Field reliability. A survey that has to cover 600 sq km in three days cannot afford the failure rate a demo tolerates. The engineering standard is the mission, not the flight.

What it proves

Owning an autonomous system from airframe to flight to delivered survey data is full-stack in the most literal sense. The drones are the physical proof of the same instinct that runs through the software work: build the thing, then make it survive contact with the real world.

Related work: Autonomous Drone Swarm for Surveillance