First flight 2004 | ||
Zhejiang University UAVs are Chinese UAVs developed by Zhejiang University, sometime referred as Zheda. Zhejiang University is primarily involved in the research of aviation subsystems, and has since expanded into the arena of UAVs.
Unmanned helicopter
Zhejiang University had developed an unmanned helicopter named as Wing of Jade Spring (Yu-Quan Zhi Yi, 玉泉之翼), which made its public debut in November 2004 at Flying Leopard Cup competition, which is a competition among aerial robotics designs in China, and it won 3rd place. Wing of Jade Spring UAV is in conventional helicopter layout with a pair of skids as landing gear, and the fuselage utilizes commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system.
The unmanned helicopter is developed by the Institute of Industrial Process Control (工业控制研究所) of the Department of Control Science and Engineering (浙江大学控制科学与工程学系) of Zhejiang University. Unlike most Chinese UAVs, Wing of Jade Spring unmanned helicopter is not intended for mass production. Instead, it is an experimental UAV for limited production and primarily used as a platform for subsystems developed by Zhejiang University for UAV applications. These subsystems includes autonomous flight control system for rotary UAVs, GPS/GIS based navigational system, strap-down real-time operating system, target identification system, integrated sensor system, and real-time data transmission and processing system. Once these subsystems are successfully tested and proven on Wing of Jade Spring, they are marketed for applications on other Chinese UAVs.