WILD HOPPER - Heavy-Duty UAV for day and night firefighting operations

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DRONE HOPPER is a company devoted to designing and manufacturing heavy-duty multirotor drones. For that, it has developed a number of proprietary technologies aimed at, essentially, providing a safe and reliable heavy-lifting platform. Special care has been taken on liquid transportation and release. WILD HOPPER is a 600-litre platform designed for forest fire firefighting. This payload capacity overcomes typical limitations of electrically powered drones that cannot be used for anything more than fire monitoring, as they do not have sufficient lifting power. It uses all the technologies developed by DRONE HOPPER, yielding a novel tool to counter rush fires worldwide. The enhanced capabilities of the WILD HOPPER allows to complement existing aerial means and overcome their main limitations, especially the need to cover night operations. This allows reducing heavily the duration of the wild fires by allowing continuous aerial support to the extinguishing activities once the conventional aerial means (hydroplanes and helicopters) are set back to the base at night. Other advantages of the WILD HOPPER are the precision of the release, derived from multirotor platform dynamic capabilities. This, together with the proprietary water jet nebulization system, yields a very high efficiency compared to traditional means that carry similar (helicopters) or more liters (hydroplanes) that just drop the water at a certain speed a highest altitudes over the target fire, limited by their dynamic operational envelope. Being an autonomous vehicle, WILD HOPPER does not put at risk human lives as platform management is done on a safe ground base. The WILD HOPPER is a less expensive platform than conventional aerial means, allowing small and medium regional bodies to own their own fast-response resources. Being less complex machines, cost of ownership is heavily reduced. Finally, WILD HOPPER allows swarm operation to implement several units in coordination to boost effiency.