Professional UAV knowledge popularization

What is a drone?

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is the abbreviation of unmanned aerial vehicle, which is an unmanned aircraft that uses radio remote control equipment and its own program control device, including unmanned helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, multi-rotor aircraft, unmanned airships, and unmanned paragliders. Broadly speaking, it also includes near space vehicles (20-100 km airspace), such as stratospheric airships, high-altitude balloons, solar-powered drones, etc. From a certain point of view, UAVs can complete complex aerial flight tasks and various payload tasks under unmanned conditions, and can be regarded as "aerial robots".

According to the classification of different platform configurations, UAVs can mainly have fixed-wing UAVs, unmanned helicopters and multi-rotor UAVs, and other small types of UAV platforms also include parachute-wing UAVs, flapping wing UAVs and unmanned spacecraft. Fixed-wing UAV is the mainstream platform of military and most civilian UAVs, the biggest feature is that the flight speed is fast, the unmanned helicopter is the most flexible UAV platform, which can take off and hover vertically in situ, and the multi-rotor (multi-rotoral) UAV is the preferred platform for consumer and some civilian uses, with flexibility between fixed-wing and helicopter (thrust is required for take-off and landing), but the operation is simple and the cost is low.

According to different fields of use, UAVs can be divided into three categories: military, civilian and consumer, and the performance requirements for UAVs have their own priorities:

1) Military UAVs have higher requirements for sensitivity, flight altitude and speed, intelligence, etc., and are UAVs with the highest technical level, including reconnaissance, decoy, electronic countermeasures, communication relays, target aircraft and unmanned fighters;

2) civil UAVs generally have low requirements for speed, ceiling and range, but have higher requirements for personnel operation training and comprehensive costs, so it is necessary to form a mature industrial chain to provide as cheap parts and support services as possible, at present, the largest market for civil UAVs lies in the provision of government public services, such as police, fire protection, meteorology, etc., accounting for about 70% of the total demand, and we believe that the future UAV potential of the greatest market may be in the civilian, new market demand may appear in agricultural plant protection, cargo speed, in-flight wireless network, data acquisition, etc.;

3) Consumer-grade UAVs generally use low-cost multi-rotor platforms for leisure purposes such as aerial photography and games.