Testing and Challenges
Testing drones in the field is challenging:
- The environment is what it is and can’t be controlled.
- Environmental conditions are not repeatable.
- Test engineers must travel to myriad field environments.
- Regulations are stringent, constantly changing, and inconsistent from one place to another.
All this drives up costs and time-to-market significantly.
Azimuth's Drone Testing Solutions
Azimuth's solutions solve the challenges associated with drone testing, and help you bring a better product to the market, faster and with lower costs by moving more of the testing to the controlled, repeatable environment of the lab.
Azimuth offers a family of solutions built on the ACE channel emulators, the scalable RF Platform—Spider™—and our field playback solution, Field-to-Lab. These help test performance under:
- Typical user scenarios (e.g., drone flying towards the user)
- Characteristic RF environments (e.g., drone flying in an indoor environment with lots of scatterers)
- Actual field environments (e.g., drone flying inside a specific sports stadium)
In addition, Azimuth's solutions also help test different aspects of the drone such as the radio link/module or the drone/overriding applications.
Radio link between the drone and the controller
- Focus on testing the performance of the radio module (s) under different RF environments (e.g., fading channels, velocity)
- Relevant for the radio module manufacturers, drone manufacturers
Drone
- Focus on testing the performance of the drone or an overriding application under different usage scenarios
- Relevant for drone manufacturers, service providers, application developers
Use Cases
- Testing the performance of the radio module, drone, or overriding applications
- Benchmarking/regression testing of drones, modules, algorithms
- Catching issues before going to the field (the lab is a controlled environment, so issues are easier to re-create and address)
- Re-create field issues such as poor video quality in a high interference environment
