Gizmos & Gadgets: SUAV:Q a Shape-Shifting Solar-Powered Drone Takes to the Air

February 27, 2017 – A team at the University of Minnesota have created a drone designed to fly over farm fields that can stay aloft all day using solar power. Called SUAV:Q, which stands for Solar Unmanned Air Vehicle Quad, the drone takes off like a helicopter and then unfolds to become a winged aircraft. When it is ready to land it folds back up to its helicopter format.

With a wingspan of 2.1 meters (approximately 6.9 feet) when fully unfolded, SUAV:Q has, on board, a multispectral camera for assessing the health of crops. It weighs less than 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds). Its wing surface consists of solar cells able to produce power for all-day continuous flight. It can fly up to altitudes of 120 meters (just under 400 feet).

Why does the SUAV:Q need to morph from helicopter to winged aircraft?

Current vertical take-off drones suffer from short flight times when compared to fixed wing models. The lack of range time makes the technology less attractive to agriculture where farmers need to survey large tracts of cropland. If an aerial drone constantly needs to be recharged it becomes more a pain then a useful survey tool. Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Minnesota, and one of the team which created SUAV:Q, explains. “In its multi-rotor state, the aircraft cannot supply enough energy from solar power alone and will rely on stored energy. Once stored energy is close to being depleted, the aircraft will transition into a fixed-wing state where the onboard batteries can recharge and the process can repeat.” That cannot happen in an exclusively designed vertical-rotor designed drone.

But SUAV:Q can take advantage of vertical takeoff and landing capability that is not inherent in fixed-wing drones. That is SUAV:Q can take off from anywhere even when the sun isn’t out. Papanikolopoulos remarks, “the idea is that anybody can buy this and carry it around in their pickup truck.”

The research going into the development of SUAV:Q has been recently described in a paper given at the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Tested in wind tunnels, particularly to ensure the transition from helicopter to winged configurations doesn’t destabilize it, the SUAV:Q development team is planning to seek commercial partners to bring the shape-shifting drone to market for a very affordable price, no more than a few thousand U.S. dollars. Beyond farmers, the developers see applications for forestry, firefighting and infrastructure surveying.