NOVAerial Robotics is pleased to announce that Phase-2 beta testing of the revolutionary Procyon 800E helicopter design is underway. Changes and improvements since Phase-1 include a complete new battery system. A payload integration system.  RFD900+ radio modem. 4th generation ESC.  And a full 3D Printed body. The new battery system is composed of dual-redundant 6S… Read More

No. There is a common misconception in the UAV industry, and particularly amongst many customers just starting their research on drone technology, that helicopters are hard to fly.  Simply put, they are not at all. The reasons for this thinking are mostly based on the past, but is no longer true today. Radio Control helicopters have… Read More

NOVAerial Robotics is pleased to present a new helicopter design which has been engineered from the ground up for UAV usage. Today, on just its 3rd test flight, the Procyon 800 Electric helicopter design demonstrated capability of achieving a 1 hour VTOL flight at speeds up to 20 m/s while carrying a 1kg payload (represented by… Read More

NOVAerial Robotics wishes to do a feature to present its mobile ground control station as an example of the type of system that professional UAV operators will probably be using in the future. This cargo trailer trailer was converted into a mobile office to support flight testing activities on large systems, in countries where the weather… Read More

  Today NOVAerial did something a little bit unusual, and definitely more difficult than flying around with a camera. A prospective customer asked to see a demonstration of a helicopter flying with a 2.5kg sensor.  This sort of thing is commonly done for magnetometer surveys for mining exploration.  The sensitive sensor must be hung from a long… Read More

Last weekend NOVAerial conducted some real cold weather testing of a 3DRobotics Iris+ equipped with Pixhawk in eastern Quebec.  Early morning temperatures in this location were -30C, which is cold enough that even gloved fingers froze after a few minutes.  Not quite frostbite, but deep into pain territory. Spurred on by Leonard Hall’s taunts (a fellow Arducopter developer),… Read More

Another recent accomplishment with the Helicopter version of Arducopter was this full auto speed run which achieved a top speed of 30 m/s or 108 km/h.  This was done using Arducopter 3.2 which features improvements to the helicopter flight dynamics code, as well as Spline Waypoints which is a general Arducopter feature.  Spline-Nav really helps… Read More

Now we’re cooking with gas! NOVAerial Robotics have just completed a project to build a helicopter with a gasoline engine, controlled by Arducopter (of course!)  This helicopter serves as a test bed for future gas heli development work for a client.  The goal was to prove out that it could be done as to date nobody… Read More