Menatir provides automated aerial monitoring of the Earth's surface by using tailsitter drones specially designed by Culver Aviation engineers.
These are unique 5-screw drones that rise vertically into the air, switching to horizontal flight mode, and land in reverse order on their tail. This mechanism ensures the smoothest possible take-off of the UAV and its landing at the given point.
The Menatir base station contains up to six such drones with different or the same type of payload to implement a wide range of tasks in various fields and industries. Read more on delo.ua.
Menatir is a network of base stations in the form of standard containers with unmanned aerial vehicles placed inside. Containers protect aircraft, ensure their launch, landing, mission performance, as well as charging and transfer of data collected by them — and all this in automatic mode.
Menatir makes it possible to comprehensively monitor any objects from the air in real time 24/7/365. The system is suitable for the tasks of fire, road, environmental, communal and infrastructure services.
Regardless of the number of base stations in the network, only one specialist is needed to manage Menatir from anywhere in the world. Service and technical support is provided by the Culver Aviation team.
“Our solution has no analogues in terms of automation and scalability. This is a new approach to working with UAVs and data. Businesses and government structures will be able to continuously receive and process information in an automatic mode with minimal human involvement and make the right management decisions. With Menatir, it is 30% cheaper than with traditional unmanned systems and helicopters,” says Oleksandr Danylenko, CEO of Culver Aviation and the author of the project.
Own designed UAVs and payloads
For this project, the company developed a unique Menatir UAV with vertical take-off and landing. On one charge, an unmanned aircraft can fly up to 45 km in one direction and return. The base station contains up to 6 such drones. One of several types of payload can be placed on the Menatir UAV:
- video camera
- video camera with a thermal imager
- digital camera
- multispectral camera
- echo sensor
- any custom equipment that meets the specified dimensions and weight.
Menatir can be used for video surveillance of any objects in HD quality, aerial photography for creating orthophoto plans of the area, monitoring the state of crops, forests, water bodies, preventing landscape fires, analyzing the state of air quality and other tasks — in real time according to a planned schedule or by request.
Base stations with scaling
To cover large areas, the system can be scaled to any number of containers, which are installed so as to overlap each other’s reach zones. Drones will be able to move freely between network stations, and it will take no more than 20 minutes to fly to any of the coverage points. In case of bad weather in the area of one of the containers or in the case of force majeure, the overlapping zones will allow to lift another UAV into the air and continue the task.
It takes 3 minutes from receiving the command to the departure of the plane. Each container has its own weather station, which will protect the UAV: the system will stop the flight mission and the aircraft will return to the container in case of bad weather.
Data collected by drones is processed and analyzed by specialized software with elements of artificial intelligence — Drone Management System. The system sends the stages of execution and the results of flight missions to network users, in particular, through a mobile application.