Facebook giant solar drone successfully flew to the ground to provide Internet access

Electronic enthusiasts eight o'clock: social networking giant Facebook is ready to use the giant solar drone flying at high altitude to provide Internet access to the ground population. According to the latest news from foreign media, this project has made significant progress. For the first time, Facebook completed the successful take-off and landing of the UAV.

The drone was named "Aquila" and its wingspan is equivalent to a giant Boeing 747. The aircraft is powered by solar energy and can fly in the air for a long time, providing network services to populations in specific areas.

According to the US technology news website Engadget, Facebook recently announced that on May 22, the Internet drone achieved a successful take-off and landing.

In June last year, the UAV had a take-off test, but it was disappointing that the aircraft crashed during the landing after 96 minutes of high-altitude flight. The US government investigated the accident and found the crash and the time. The wind speed is too big.

According to reports, the flight on May 22, stayed in the air for 46 minutes, the main purpose of the test was to collect more data.

Facebook said that after the last crash, the team learned the lesson and made a lot of improvements to the drone, changing the design of the wing. In addition, the aircraft added hundreds of new sensors to collect various data and provide it to the automatic flight control system.

It is worth mentioning that the giant drone designed by Facebook does not have the landing gear of the traditional aircraft, and uses special buffering devices, which have special requirements for landing.

Facebook's Internet drones have been developed for a long time, and whether there will be commercial success in the future, there are still big doubts.

Coincidentally, there has been a similar project within Google (microblogging) in the past, providing high-altitude drones to provide Internet access to people in remote areas. But not long ago, in the plan to clean up internal low-efficiency R&D projects, Google has completely cut off the UAV project and believes that there is little possibility of commercial use in the future. However, Google will continue to develop high-altitude online balloon projects.

In the online balloon, Google will put a large number of helium balloons in the atmosphere. The communication devices of these balloons can communicate with the mobile communication base stations on the ground. In other words, the high air ball is equivalent to expanding the geographical coverage of the mobile base station. Several base stations can cover a large area of ​​land, especially for developing countries with underdeveloped terrestrial communication networks.

Google's online balloon project is still under trial and is not commercially available on a large scale.

Facebook and Google are the world's two largest online advertising giants, accounting for almost two-thirds of the global online advertising market. The products of the two companies (social networks, web search) are already aging, and they want to develop people in developing countries into new users, thereby expanding network traffic and advertising revenue.

In addition to Internet drones, Facebook is also expanding the number of mobile Internet users by promoting mobile communication services. In cooperation with Facebook and mobile operators in various developing countries, Facebook has launched a low-cost data service, but in countries such as India. It also triggered criticism that disrupted the communications market and violated the principle of net neutrality.

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