Zephyr: A High Altitude Long Endurance Unmanned Air Vehicle ...

5.5 FutureZephyr is currently way ahead of anyone else in building a sustainable long enduranceunmanned air vehicle. Eventually however, competitors will catch up and Zephyr willhave to improve as technology advances in order to be better than the rest. In order todo this, the Zephyr team should try and find a way of increasing the payload limitabove 2kg. At the moment it is hard to develop a camera that is powerful enough toview the earth closely and weigh less than 2kg. A larger payload would allow othermanufacturers to place better and heavier cameras on board, or even allow for morethan one, for example a visible and infrared camera.A larger payload would also allow Zephyr to be used for more than just imaging, forexample it could have more instruments to measure atmosphere data or even to flythrough hurricanes.Zephyr can currently be controlled from anywhere in the world, but it currently takesat least five people and a large area with multiple computer screens to do so. Forfuture development it would be better if the aircraft could be controlled fromsomething much smaller, for example a laptop, and only require one person. Thiswould mean that a lot of the current functions that people perform would have tobecome automated. This would be a benefit as if Zephyr was used by the police forceto track a vehicle for example, it would be possible for a single operator in a policecar to monitor and control Zephyr following the tracked vehicle at the same time. Thiswould save time and money as the information from Zephyr could go directly to68