A robotics and drone company has claimed that it has conducted the longest drone flight of 51 km in India to survey the pipeline of the Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) in Haryana.
"I believe the previous longest drone flight in India was of 42 km," he said.
The entire flight -- from take off to landing -- was fully autonomous, which means it was on auto-pilot, he said.
"We had a tracker mechanism on the drone. We could track it over our 4G network with our tracker," he noted.
HPCL wants Omnipresent to extend the range of Omni Hansa V5 to 100-200 km, he said.
Omni Hansa V5 can take off and land like a helicopter so it does not need a runway. However, once it is in air, it flies like a plane, Sinha stated.
This drone is called hybrid fixed-wing VTOL (vertical take off and landing) drone, he explained.
"We successfully completed India's longest drone flight. We flew the drone for 51 km for one of our pipeline clients HPCL. It was a BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) flight. This is a record in India," he claimed.
He said the flight took place to survey the pipeline of HPCL that runs between Delhi and Haryana.
"It (pipeline) starts from Bahadurgarh (in Haryana)," he added.