Ritu UAV

Ritu UAV is a Chinese UAV developed by Guangdong Rui-Tu Wan-Fang Science & Technology Co., Ltd. (Ritu, 广东瑞图万方科技有限公司). It is worth to notice that the company use abbreviation Ritu instead of the usual Ruitu as in Pinyin.

Twin engine UAV

Ritu is a digital map provider in China, and in order to gather information, aerial survey is needed. The reliance on other aerial survey and photography providers proved to be inconvenient, and Ritu thus formed its own aerial survey subsidiary ^[1] in August 2006 so that it could have aerial survey capability of its own. Originally operating as an aerial surveyor using UAVs provided by other manufacturers, AUT gradually expanded its business to manufacturing UAVs by becoming a licensed manufacturer of multirotors of German Microdrones GmbH in China.^[2] However, due to the limitation of multirotors, a larger UAV with greater performance envelop was needed, and as a result, Ritu developed a UAV of its own design, which is a radical departure from those license manufactured earlier: instead of multirotor or unmanned helicopter, it is a fixed-wing UAV in twin boom layout with high wing configuration with tricycle landing gear.^[3] Ritu's fixed-wing UAV utilizes commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) subsystems which are integrated together as the final product, and such practice greatly reduced the time needed for development, thus making it available to be deployed to support post-disaster analysis by participating in aerial photography missions, including the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.^[3] Ritu fixed-wing UAV is equipped with GPS navigation and is capable of real time imagery transmission.^[4] This fixed-wing UAV is one of the few twin-engine Chinese UAVs, with a pair of two-blade propeller-driven engines, one mounted in the nose of the fuselage, and the other at the rear end of the fuselage.^[4]

See also

List of unmanned aerial vehicles of the People's Republic of China

References