For the time being airborne vehicle maintenance costs are too high for continued experimentation. I’m therefore shifting components and funding to ground based development platforms. There are 4 ground vehicles I have available for this, in various states of form and function. The third vehicle, a rock crawler, has started to be used for these tests. I began by outfitting the rock crawler with a go-pro camera hooked to a 900mhz wireless video transmitter. This was replaced with a security camera with IR leds for night operation. The latest iteration uses a cell phone running Android for audio and video transmission.
The key objective of this project is the development of fault tolerant and interference resistant remote sensing and actuation capabilities with low cost and maintenance requirements. Vehicles can be used to extend the reach of this capability by bridging network islands and providing station mobility.