First home grown sUAS for Taiwan.
Taipei, April 22 (CNA) A local company has unveiled Taiwan’s first indigenous unmanned vehicle for aerial photography, hoping to break into a market that so far has been monopolized by imported products.
The AI Rider, a system based on a six-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle weighing about 1,450 grams, is highly competitive because of its price and after-sales service, including training that is more easily available to domestic customers, said Clark Lin, vice president of Gang Yu Corp.
After its introduction during Secutech, an international security exhibition being held in Taipei this week, importers from countries such as the United States, Japan, Russia and Thailand have already shown interest in becoming its distributors, Lin added.
The remote-controlled aerial photography vehicle is said to be entirely developed in Taiwan and made with domestic components. It can carry a payload, such as a video camera, of up to 400 grams, and can climb to an altitude of 550 meters.
It can withstand a sustained wind speed of up to 10 meters per second, or an instantaneous wind speed of no more than 15 meters per second.
With a fully-charged battery, the drone can fly up to 13 minutes with a 250-gram payload, and can reach a 750-meter radius from its handler.
The company said the AI Rider is more competitive price-wise than imported products with similar specifications. Its price of US$25,000 is one-seventh of the asking price for foreign imports.
The AI Rider has already been used by Taiwan’s military and academic institutions for surveillance and geographic surveying. Now, it can also be for search and rescue or recreation.
