A testing program combining newly developed telecommunications network and MMC’s hydrogen fueled drone series was in trial in MMC’s R&D centre in Shenzhen, China earlier this month. The upcoming innovative creation is aimed to develop industrial drone solutions with a potential endurance of up to 8 hours and potential range of hundreds of kilometres.

While commercial drone development has progressed over the last several years, the effective range of signal and transmission – still not able to reach 10 km – and the flight time endurance of many drones have remained technical bottlenecks. With most drones offering flight time of fewer than 30 minutes on a battery, industrial applications are often constrained by the limitations of available equipment.

MMC’s hydrogen fuel cell drone Hydrone 1550 has already shattered the ceiling of flight endurance, offering a lightweight but rugged industrial solution with flight times of more than 3 hours. Its advantages are long flight endurance, easy operation and high safety efficiency. They make Hydrone 1550 the best supporter for industrial aerial inspection. Hydrone 1550 ideally can take off in the command centre and land automatically at the same spot after finishing the task. The responding time towards emergencies much shorter while effective coverage area is much larger. The Hydrone 1550 is not only used in surveying but also in powerline inspection, oil inspection, forestry firefighting and monitoring, etc. Its multifunction makes it one of the most competitive drones in the world. With the telecommunication technology, the soon-to-be-released next generation of hydrogen drones is expected to increase flight time to more than 8 hours.

UAV telecommunication solution enables unrestricted coverage of signals and transmissions. Combining the two technologies could allow a drone operator to design a long range flight plan allowing autonomous drones to perform a wide variety of commercial, security, and industrial applications – smashing two of the main technical barriers to widespread adoption of commercial drones.