Alternatively, it would be possible to use a larger or more energy dense battery to have a flight time of 1 hour if this is required. We feel that this would provide a decent amount of time in the air and we can quickly change batteries when on the ground to get another 30 minutes of flight available. Obviously, the longer the better but with the current limitations of the technology we would be happy with 30 minutes on a standard battery. The quad needs to have a flight time that is useful when in the field monitoring bats. Something we're particularly interested in is flight time. The quad gained the required height then flew back to a position over the takeoff point and proceeded with the landing. Please get in touch with us at either: or on Twitter you're not in the UK and are curious about bat drones then we would be happy to offer our support and advice for how to buy/build your own drone and start collecting data! We also have a post on this subject here.Īgain, we're happy with the result here. If you work at an ecological consultancy or research institution we'd love to hear from you and talk about how we could collaborate. We have successfully shown that bats can be acoustically recorded from drones - see the recordings of the quad here, plane here and boat here. If you're not familiar with our project then you can see a review in our last post or to sum up: we're investigating drones as a tool for acoustic monitoring in bat work. We are planning on comparing data collected by drones with traditional methods and exploring new and unique uses (eg at altitude, over forest canopies, over water). We're looking to collaborate with bat workers in the UK (ideally in the South-East as that's where we are we're also happy to collaborate with those further afield and in other countries, see a bit below). It was also decided at this stage that the quadcopter would be a better tool for surveying due to the small survey sites, topography and the layout of the grounds. We identified a number of sites, mostly along waterways, hedge and tree lines that we thought had good potential for bat commuting routes. We initially visited the site in late June for an assessment of potential sites and whether the quadcopter or plane would be a better tool for surveying. We couldn't have asked for more or have done it without him. We want to give a big thanks at this point to Ross Wingfield who was the head ranger at Scotney and did an amazing job supporting us in a heap of different ways from driving us round the site to showing us his own drone sourced topography maps of the site. Happily, we were contacted by a number of people and were able to work with the National Trust at their property - Scotney Castle, in Kent. A little while ago we were asking if anyone was interested in collaborating in some field feasibility testing.
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