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Helikite test flight on the Campus West rugby pitch

Posted on 16 June 2021

On 28 May 2021 Dr Yi Chu, Professor David Grace and the technical team led by Andy White carried out a test flight of the 21 m3 Helikite with an upgraded inertial measurement unit (IMU) on the Campus West rugby pitch.

The IMU has a set of sensors which are able to collect various pieces of flight information in real time such as pitch, roll and yaw angles/speeds, GPS location and altitude. The flight information was successfully sent to a ground station via an RF link on the 868 MHz ISM band.

This was the first Helikite test flight since the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Future plans have been made to operate a private LTE/5G network from the Helikite to provide coverage for temporary events for the MANY project.

Check out the Helikite footage recorded from above.