Every year, the drone industry continues to raise the bar, pushing the boundaries of what drones can achieve. A key metric that keeps evolving is maximum flight time. In this competitive landscape, even a few seconds can make a difference in a drone's ranking.
You will get efficient and thoughtful service from Wing Flying.
Our expertise lies in the characterization and optimization of propulsion systems, a crucial element that can significantly extend your flight time. But beyond propulsion testing, there are various ways to boost your flight time, ranging from strategies that can add minutes to your flights to those that offer mere fractions of a second.
Some of these 'obvious' improvements will likely be familiar to members of the drone ecosystem, whereas the 'not-so-obvious' improvements might actually surprise you (let us know in the comments either way).
5 'Obvious' Ways to Make a Drone Fly Longer
1. Choose a high efficiency motor
Brushless motors that have low resistance, good cooling properties and high quality components are generally most efficient. Unfortunately, motor datasheets are not always reliable when it comes to reporting true efficiency figures, so it's important to test them yourself to validate the numbers. Including highly efficient motors in your drone is a great way to get a good return on investment in terms of flight time.
2. Find the right batteries
There are so many things to consider when it comes to choosing the right batteries that this could be an article of its own. Actually, we did write an article on that, which you can check out here. Here's a brief summary of the key points:
3. Choose your altitude wisely
Generally speaking, flying at lower altitudes is where you will find lower wind speeds and less wind resistance, meaning less work for your drone and an increased flight time. But that's not always the case. Here's some resources for checking the wind conditions before your flight:
4. Calibrate and clean your drone regularly
Regular calibration can help your drone fly more efficiently and extend your flight time. If your drone's center of gravity is not properly balanced, it can affect the drone's stability and handling, which in turn can increase your power consumption and reduce your flight time. Regular maintenance is also crucial to keep your drone in good condition, and this can extend its lifespan and improve its performance.
5. Use energy-saving design components
Certain drone components are superior for reducing losses and increasing flight time. Aerodynamic energy-saving features include streamlined arms and frames, adjustable propellers and ducted rotors. Electrical energy-saving features include low resistance wiring, voltage regulators, and ESCs optimized for efficiency. With any of these components there may be a trade-off with drag and weight, so testing various configurations is ideal to get the best performance.
5 'Not-So-Obvious' Ways to Make a Drone Fly Longer
1. Use propellers with a low blade number and low pitch
Propellers with fewer blades are generally more efficient. In theory, the most efficient propeller would actually have a single blade. In practice, however, having at least two blades is much more practical from a balancing perspective.
Propellers with a low pitch can also reduce energy consumption, as long as your drone is flying slowly. If you are flying quickly, it often makes more sense to have a propeller with a higher pitch. Testing different propellers to find the most efficient ones is a great way to significantly increase your flight time.
2. Find the most efficient motor-propeller combination
Testing various motors and propellers with a thrust stand like the Series can tell you which combination of components has the highest overall efficiency, giving you the highest possible flight time. Efficiency doesn't stop at the individual component level, it is also important to make sure your components work well together.
Contact us to discuss your requirements of how to test drone motors. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.
3. Reduce hovering and fly at a steady speed
Forward flight is more efficient than hovering (up to a certain speed). When in hover, the rotors have to accelerate a smaller amount of air downward, which requires more energy. In contrast, in forward flight, the drone is constantly moving into new air, allowing it to generate lift more efficiently.
Additionally, in forward flight, the drone can benefit from aerodynamic components that provide additional lift and reduce the load on the rotors, further improving efficiency.
4. Use a high-quality charger
Using a high-quality charger can help you charge your battery more efficiently and extend battery life. Charging your battery too quickly can cause it to degrade faster over time, leading to gradually shorter flight times.
Additionally, keep a close eye on your battery life and avoid draining it completely as this can shorten its lifespan. Over-discharging puts stress on the battery cells and can lead to irreversible damage that may reduce overall battery capacity.
5. Don't fly too far from the controller
When a drone is further from the controller, it may require more power in order to maintain a stable connection with the receiver. This is especially relevant if there are obstacles between the drone and the controller. To save on power and improve flight time, operate your controller from as close to the drone as possible.
Conclusion
In the world of drones, maximizing flight time is key. By considering both conventional and less conventional strategies, you can extend your drone's endurance significantly.
What strategies do you use to extend flight time? Let us know in the comments.
The benefits of drone surveying for construction companies can be grouped into 4 major categories. Increased efficiency, reduced expenses, improved safety standards, and improved data accuracy.
1. Efficiency ' Anyone who has ever been through the process of manually surveying a construction site can tell you that it is not an easy process. It takes time, a workforce with a very particular skill set, money, and a willingness to redo the survey if anything goes wrong. Approximately five acres can be surveyed per hour with traditional methods. With drone surveying, even beginner surveyors are capable of surveying 120 acres per hour for a 60x improvement in surveying efficiency. For a company with 10 different 120-acre sites that they want to survey 5 times per year, traditional surveying for each site would require 24 hours of work, taking 120 hours per site, per year. Across all sites this would require 1,200 hours of work annually.
Drone surveying in comparison is capable of completing each of the five annual site surveys in one hour each, taking only five hours per site. Across all ten sites this would only amount to 50 total hours invested to complete these surveys. Obviously, drone surveying significantly reduces the total time investment needed to survey a site. But one of the other benefits of this increased efficiency is that on a construction site work is nearly always being done across many areas.
Keeping track of everything is difficult and for many companies chaos can become the norm. With traditional surveying, larger construction sites can require multiple work days to finish, in that time there's no telling what has changed since the survey started. This often requires re-surveying and can severely delay the beginning of new work that could get in the way of the surveyors. In a perfect world the differences in efficiency between traditional surveying and drone surveying would remain the way it is presented in a purely numerical sense. But construction is an industry where things rarely go exactly to plan, when unexpected delays and problems emerge, the inefficiency of traditional surveying can compound and cause further issues down the road. The increased efficiency, accuracy, and adaptability of drone surveying helps to make sure construction companies can deliver more projects on time and within budget.
2. Expense Reduction ' As mentioned earlier, traditional site surveying requires a much larger time and manpower investment in order to complete the survey. With those extra hours and surveyors comes salaries, equipment, and all the other expenses that come with construction work. Looking at salaries alone and assuming a traditional surveyor works for $100/hour and a drone surveyor works for $120/hour the savings can still be substantial. Even with the higher hourly rate the drone surveyor would only be required to log 50 total hours of billable work per calendar year for a total cost of $6,000 of annual surveying fees.
In comparison a traditional surveyor would require the aforementioned 1,200 hours of work. These 1,200 billable hours of work would require a total surveying cost of $2,400 per survey and $120,000 worth of total annual surveying fees. In total drone surveying is capable of saving $114,000 dollars in drone surveying fees compared to traditional surveying for a relatively small company needing to conduct 50 surveys annually. Needless to say, for larger companies these savings would only increase, and this assumes that everything related to surveying goes according to plan and does not require any rework. The different projects that could be used to calculate expenses could involve a multitude of different assumptions, but any serious look at the data regarding drone surveying compared to traditional surveying will acknowledge that drone surveying is incredibly effective at reducing time and expense requirements to ultimately make drone surveying an incredibly effective way for construction companies to reduce variable expenses.
3. Improved Safety Standards ' Construction by its nature involves work that can be dangerous. Surveying is no different from any other part of the construction process. Traditional surveying often requires workers to enter difficult-to-reach positions on worksites with many moving pieces. To really impart the value of safety in a construction company, it's necessary to go beyond simply treating safety as a checklist item to be taken care of in order to keep a supervisor off your back. Changing work practices to reduce the total risk that workers are exposed to is an essential part of producing better safety outcomes.
Reviewing site maps and data obtained by drone surveying can be done from the comfort of an office or any area of a worksite without ever having to expose workers to significant bodily harm. Across the construction industry falls account for 34% of workers fatalities on construction sites, and 1 in 5 deaths among US workers is in the construction industry. Not only is drone surveying helpful for keeping workers out of harm's way, but the data can be more accurately and efficiently gathered through drone surveying and can be used to spot potential hazards on a work site before they cause problems.
Of course, the main benefit of increased safety standards is the avoidance of injuries but safety also has a huge effect on a company's bottom line. In the US, fatal construction injuries are estimated to cost $5 billion each year in health care, lost production, reduced quality of life for family members, and lost income. Any construction company that is serious about improving safety has to consider updating their surveying process to include drone surveying.
4. Improved Data Accuracy ' The process to collect data with drone surveying is called drone photogrammetry. In simple terms drone photogrammetry is the process of measuring real-life distances from overlapping photos that take into account all different angles and perspectives. The process may sound complicated but when done with a drone it can be completed quickly and with a degree of accuracy that is very difficult for traditional surveying to match. In a single surveying flight, drone data processed with a surveying software like Propeller can produce a full map of the surveyed site with accurate measurements of distances, surfaces, elevations, volumes, and provide GPS points represented in either two or three dimensions.
Quick, accurate, and cost efficient drone surveying can be done as often as necessary, and it provides the ability to analyze the data with a cloud-based software platform like Propeller. Drone surveying also ensures that all project stakeholders from subcontractors to off-site work teams can have access to the data in an easy-to-understand format to ensure the entire project is progressing on time and according to design.
Having the right information at the right time across multiple, separate parties goes a long way to ensure that projects can come in on time and within budget.
Across the construction industry rework, conflict resolution, and looking for unavailable project data costs construction companies $177 billion annually. Propeller's drone surveying program for construction companies can ensure that all your surveying data is processed correctly and quickly, ensuring accountability, communication, and collaboration to deliver the highest level of performance possible.
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