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The Company
BFD Systems (which is now part of FreeFly systems) is a UAV hardware development and integration company. They "specialize in large industrial multi-rotors for heavy lift payloads, long endurance flights, gas hybrid UAVs, hydrogen fuel cells, and tethered UAV solutions."
The Project
We developed a suite of products to enable tethered flight of their industrial multi-rotor and heavy-lift aircraft. Without a tether a drone can only fly using battery power for a short period of time, but with the BFD tether system these drones can fly for hours or days. This opens up new possibilities for industrial applications in telecom and imaging.
The tether power supply (TPS) box takes 240 volt power from a generator on the ground, converts it to 380 volt dc and sends it up a 500 foot specialized, light-weight tether to the aircraft. The system also integrates commercial grade fiber optic communication and networking equipment.
We utilized a combination of custom and off-the-shelf components packaged into a portable, light-weight, rugged enclosure suitable for rapid field deployment in remote locations.
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