https://filmora.wondershare.com/drones/drones-with-longest-f...
https://defensesystems.com/articles/2017/09/cw/army-research...
Edited to add: this is the sort of thing:
https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2017/05/22/aerovironments-c...
I actually had a client ask me about just such an application yesterday. It's a really great concept and definitely worth exploring.
I bet the sensors and the control systems all have memory overflows or number range issues in the software that isn't being dealt with because it's a closed system. Add to that few if any customers are asking to use their drone as a static tripod.
To start: I'm not sure what you mean by OS driver/control software. The two main (non-proprietary) flight controller platforms are PX4 and ArduPilot, which both basically act OS-like. Depending on which platform you're building for, they can use things like ChibiOS under the hood as well.
It's not memory overflows. These can fly for long periods of time, but sitting on the ground for a couple of minutes can be enough to require a reboot. What it is, best I can tell from the limited debugging I've done so far, is accumulated sensor bias. When the aircraft is in the air, you've got some sensors providing short-term data (accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers) and some sensors providing long-term data (GPS, optical stabilization if fitted); the short-term sensors are noisy, and an Extended Kalman Filter does sensor fusion to provide estimates that are the combined values from the fast sensors and the slow sensors. When a GPS update comes in, the EKF corrects for the biases in the sensors.
When you're sitting on the ground in a stationary position, you're only measuring noise. The accelerometers are saying you're accelerating a little bit this way and a little bit that way; the gyros are saying you've spun a bit; the GPS says you've moved around some. The GPS signal is nominally mean-zero motion, but the rest of the sensors give both bias and noise. The EKF tries to filter out the noise and correct for the bias, but because the GPS is also wobbling around, it seems that it doesn't do the bias estimation correctly. For example, this sample, the accelerometers say that you've accelerated south, but the GPS sample has moved 0.5m north. Also, GPS doesn't help correct everything unless the aircraft is in motion; if there's magnetometer drift and gyro bias in the same, the aircraft has no way of knowing that it hasn't rotated (when you're airborne, you can use the GPS signal to know which direction you're moving, even if the magnetometer says you're pointed off by a few degrees).
Full motor cutoff/checkpointing is a fun one. One thing I've found that seems to seems to exasperate the issue is picking it up when it's on the ground, adjusting a camera or something, and putting it back down on the ground. That's an almost guaranteed way to get a "high accelerometer bias" or "compass skew" error.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/stanford...
also, I think you are underestimating the odds of getting caught flying a drone in a city. an off-the-shelf consumer drone is probably only going to have about 15-20 minutes of fly time, but you need to give yourself a good buffer to fly to/from the location. if you just want to record a single ten minute video and call it a day, you'll probably get away with it. but if you want to record a meaningful amount of footage, you need to keep recovering the drone, swapping out batteries, and relaunching. this creates a lot of opportunities for someone to see you with the drone. if you crash the drone and the police recover it, there could be enough metadata on it to identify the operator.
Second, if your drone is under 250 grams, the rules are pretty much "don't put people in harms way" and "don't put aircraft in harm's way". The DJI Mavic Mini was designed pretty much to squeeze under that limit, coming in at 249g. I don't know if the FAA has a similar rule (a quick Google search suggested the answer is "maybe").
You could be high enough that no one would notice, but then you're not going to get especially useful video. Low light situations wouldn't help.
A racing drone would be more difficult to control (AFAIK, no hover or GPS-based positioning) in trying to film specific things for 20 minutes at a time.
If you wanted to film with a touch of elevation over a crowd, you'd carry a GoPro on a stick. Cheaper, cheaper batteries, can charge via USB with any battery pack.