[tonyarkles]

> Drones are not very good at covering large areas of ground quickly.

I work with imaging drones in agriculture and every time we run the numbers the answer is almost always fixed wing. We have multirotors that have no problem flying at 80+km/h, but the battery life kills our ability to cover broad areas of land without having to land and swap batteries. With fixed-wing you get (depending on many factors) a ~10:1 efficiency improvement but also need significantly more skill as a pilot and potentially more infrastructure (e.g. a viable runway of some kind). VTOL fixed wings have some potential, but the takeoff and landing burns so much battery that you lose a lot of the advantages of the fixed wing.

[Vox_Leone]

I am developing CV systems for agribusiness and have been grappling with this issue. The solution seems to be a combination of the two systems. Quads are great for some tasks like herd detection/sorting/counting and spotting problems in planting. For crop dusting, seed planting, geo surveys in general you go with fixed wings.

[tonyarkles]

Yeah, one of the approaches we're looking at involves using fixed wings to cover 98% of our surveys and "mopping up" the areas we can't hit with a quadrotor (e.g. near power lines, trees, other keepout zones)

[Wojtkie]

Hmm, what about a launcher? Slingshot the drone any number of ways, then "landing" can be handled by an arrestor net.

[tonyarkles]

Yeah, for sure! That's exactly the approach that Zipline has taken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeSCEalMOL8&t=60s

There are some practicality points to it. For example, their system works awesome when you have a fixed base but might be impractical when launching with gear that's towable with half-ton truck.