Venezuela says building drones with Iran's help

[Igel]

29. Remote plane tech is easily available.

What's less readily available are the systems that remove all the jitter from the camera.

Imagine taking a video using a handheld camera. You have to keep the picture still enough for somebody firing a missile to aim the missile and fire it. That means you have to keep the image on the tv screen from moving much more than an 1/8 of an inch or so. Not so easy.

Now imagine walking. Same task.

Now imagine that your camera is mounted to a bicycle. Every bump, every turn, and not only does the target move, it moves out of the screen.

Now tack on the vibration from a motor. Have you ever held a remote plane? They're jittery. Any vibration can easily make the image you're trying to aim at move back and forth across half the screen 100+ times per second. And the vibrations are in 3 dimensions

The upshot is that you have to have software that can ID the limits of an object on screen, even at night; you need to integrate that with servo motors that can adjust the camera and move it just right to completely remove any effect of vibration from the motors or from the wind. You then need to make sure a targeting computer gets all the information fast enough to target and fire in real time. And, finally, you need to make sure the software and hardware that flies can be looped back with the camera software so that the pilot can easily use that information to fly the remote.

This requires some fast software and very fast, very accurate, very precise servo motors that work to correct the missile orientation, camera orientation, aileron, and thrust.

They worked on this for years back in the 70s. The first working drone prototypes were a bit later. Took years to get the missile targeting accurate enough.