There is no doubt that unmanned aircrafts (drones) are becoming more and more popular not only abroad but in our country as well. What are drones used for in the civil sector now? A lot of people might have seen flying plastic or foam quadcopters of Chinese origin in parks or resting places. As a rule, amateur photo- and video- devices are used as a working load for such facilities as small and light video cameras of a GoPro type, less often professional cameras are attached to them for creation of commercials.

MEPhI specialists have offered to broaden possibilities and the sphere of usage of multirotor aircrafts. Thus, employees of the Department of applied nuclear physics which has recently become a basic department of the Russia Research Institute of Automatics (VNIIA) fruitfully work on creation of a whole aircraft including a gamma radiation detector with a scan aperture (an application for the invention has been applied in September, 2015), a heavy multirotor aircraft with its own system of avionics and telemetering system, automatic tracking antenna system on the basis of three-band planar antenna, base station of telemetry control and acceptance and all-weather charging station, providing for unattended re-charging of the drone fuel elements. The supervisor of these works at the Department №24 is the Cand. of Phys.-Math. Sc. A. A. Kaplun. He is also the chief designer and ideologist of the whole project.

As Andrey Kaplun said, the system of electronic equipment allows to determine exactly the vector of the direction of motion on the radiation source at a height of 20 m. Being in a search mode, without the usage of large aerotechnics of a helicopter kind as a carrier, the drone is run by a detector and can change its altitude from the Earth surface itself for the correction and precision of the motion vector. MEPhI specialists have used drone’s unique ability of turning on its axis and have received a detector-drone mixture.

Drone prototypes made at Department №24 on which electronics of avionics and principles of M2M connectivity have been tested

The application of a new detector is wide and diverse. The developers offer creation of a 3D-cartography of isotope contents’ distribution in the space as an additional sphere of complex usage. This can be useful for environmental control around and on the territory of objects of nuclear-powered complex.