Some early aircraft took landing on water as a primary landing strategy rather than landing on ground. With the refinement of landing gears and safety precautions, aircraft moved towards landing on ground.
Mostly helpful in a large number of applications, landing on water or taking off from an aquatic surface can be very helpful if the aircraft is designed to land and take off from both land and ground without any manual modification.
“Amphibious drones” are therefore, a special area of interest for drone developers as the places for an airborne robot to land on are explored and expanded.
Aeromapper Talon
Aeromapper Talon, is an amphibious drone. It has a top speed of 38 miles per hour and two hours of continuous flight. It is designed for quality surveying and patrolling and is marketed mainly to government, commercial and environmentally conscious buyers who value feasibility of the drone in commercial setups and are willing to compromise on price of the drone.
The Talon is capable of covering as much as 13 square miles of area with a decent resolution of 4.6 inches captured in one pixel and a much higher resolution can be captured in much smaller areas of operation.
Talon is attractive to defense customers in the US since it has been developed by Aeromao, a Canadian company, one of the leading fixed wing mapping drone, RTK, PPK & survey drone manufacturers in Toronto. Although the Canadian company is not exempt from the regulatory laws associated with drones manufactured outside of the US by the Pentagon, but the drone is still more likely to sell in the defence department of the US as compared with non-American commercial models.
The Talon, as already stated, is an amphibious drone. Activity of aircrafts in littoral and wetland areas is generally difficult and flying a small aircraft from a ship into the marshes and processing the imagery recorded into meaningful mapping translates into a better data processing results or a better interpretation of the data captured by the drone as it recorded its environment.
Small flying robots and drones or UAVs are slowly being utilized in military operations more and more. In military operations, having the perfect tool for the job is imperative and the Talon drone offers just the right for certain missions. Autonomous belly-flopping a drone with a camera mounted on its body is not very graceful to see, but it is highly effective as the drone can be easily landed on water surfaces and can be conveniently retrieved.