A local company has unveiled the nation’s first indigenous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for 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 UAV weighing about 1.45kg, is highly competitive because of its price and after-sales service, including a training program that is 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 US, Japan, Russia and Thailand have shown interest in becoming distributors, Lin said.
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 400g and can climb to an altitude of 550m.
It can withstand a sustained wind speed of up to 10m per second, or an instantaneous wind speed of no more than 15m per second.
With a fully charged battery, the drone can fly for up to 13 minutes with a 250g payload and can reach a 750m radius from its handler.
The company said the AI Rider is more competitively priced than imported products with similar specifications. Its price of US$25,000 is a 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 used for newsgathering, recreation and search and rescue operations.
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