920 Retrofit — Highly Redundant Hexa Copter Platform for BVLOS Missions

Based on a proven frame

You might have seen this frame before — the concept is based on a Yuneec Tornado H920, which is still a good frame: light weight, reliable, some redundancy through hexa drive, tailored for take-off weight (TOW) between 3.2 and 6 kg including a payload of up to 2.3 kg. The downside was so far, that its electronics, radio transmission and software was not maintained and onward developed for several years now, which left many users dissatisfied.

We replaced the mainboard, the flight controller and the radio transmission by a selection of latest available technologies and developed some components by ourselves in order to achieve BVLOS capability and a high level of redundancy of active components.

This little video gives some impressions about the improvements applied to the platform:

If you want to learn more about the innovative triple-redundant BVLOS radio control / telemetry / HD video transmission “HyraCom”, please follow this link.

Summarized Features

• Hexa — 5 rotor flight safety
• Double redundant battery
• Double redundant GNSS
• Triple redundant IMU (two of them damped and temperature controlled)
• 3.2 kg min. TOW
• 6.0 kg max. TOW (2.3 kg payload)
• Foldable arms, retractable landing gear
• Optional emergency parachute
• HyraCom — triple redundant LTE (4G) + 868 MHz + 2.4 GHz long-range communication, mesh capable
• HD video streaming to multiple clients
• Video quality (h.264): up to 1080p30 or 720p60, hardware encoding, adjustable bitrate
• Range of control / telemetry / HD video via mobile network link (3G / 4G where covered): unlimited
• Range of control + telemetry via 2.4 GHz (Europe, CE and ETSI conform): about 2 km (can be extended by mesh network nodes)
• Range of control + telemetry via 868 MHz (Europe, CE and ETSI conform): to be determined (can be extended by mesh network nodes)
• Encryption: AES
• Display: 7 inch touch screen
• Latency: typically between 50 ... 200 ms (increases in case you set up a mesh network with repeaters)
• Telemetry decoding and display on ground unit: MAVLink 1 and 2 compatible
• Additional telemetry: temperature of up to 4 sensors that can be distributed on aircraft (e.g. on ESC, battery)
• Plugin mechanism for custom user code using an onboard API providing MAVLink telemetry data stream
• Optional UTM integration: forwarding of UTM_GLOBAL_POSITION messages to air traffic control (e.g. DFS)
• Flight controller software according to preference: ArduCopter or PX4
• Separate Ground Control Station (Mission Planner or QGroundControl) can be connected via Bluetooth

Options

This is how it could look like when you attach our preferred gimbal with a Sony A7RII and the new ZEISS Ventum 2.8/21 to the platform: