Tsukuba Japan drone testing "Rain Room"

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This is a video of an EAMS Lab vehicle (running ArduPilot of course) being tested in the Tsukuba Japan drone testing facility owned by NIED (National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience).

This is one of the first tests of the room and involved measuring increase in power usage in heavy rain. Future tests will likely involve testing control performance.

Two vehicles were tested, a quadcopter (LAB477 with 1kg payload) and a hexacopter (LAB6106 with 3kg payload). the rain was tested at 100mm/h, 180mm/h and 300mm/hour. The test included hovering, climb and descent and horizontal movement.

Quad results:

  • hovering with 180mm/h, 9% increase in consumption
  • hovering with 300mm/h, 8% increase (over 180mm/h?)

Hexa results:

  • hovering with 180mm/h rain, 15% increase
  • hovering with 300mm/h rain, 6% increase (over 180mm/h?)

The test results are somewhat interesting but for me at least, the existance of this massive “rain room” is the coolest part of all this. There are some other drone testing facilities being built in Japan which include small lakes, tunnels, object avoidance courses, etc that I will blog about once I have more details.

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Hey cool! I fly in rain often, so it’s nice to know these numbers.

My own drone testing facility like this is a dream of mine.

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So cool! Love the facility, I really think the Japanese are the greatest engineers on earth.

In the UK however to do this sort of testing we can just go outside, we can get rain of varying intensities almost every day :slight_smile:

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