At this point, we were building something closer to a real surveillance platform. We mounted a 50x optical zoom camera on a gimbal, and started testing it on a small UGV. The goal was simple: define a mission, send it to a location that might be dangerous, and let the vehicle handle the surveillance quietly, without risking anyone.
People often ask, "Why not just use a drone?"The answer is simple - drones don’t perform well everywhere. Forests, buildings, underground zones… not ideal. Also, carrying heavy payloads like a zoom camera on a miniature drone just doesn’t make sense. The trade-offs are too big.
This project was still in the early phase. It was mostly about exploring what’s possible, what makes sense, and where the limits are. We were building a list of real, useful features that could go into the next version, once we had enough field data to back it up.
