Unmanned Systems Technology 004 | Delair-Tech DT18 | Autopilots | Rotron RT600 | Unmanned surface vehicles | AMRC | Motion control | Batteries

14 L osing a student competition to build an unmanned aerial system (UAS) led Jonathan Downey to a multimillion dollar venture to fundamentally change the way such aircraft are designed and operated. That company, San Francisco-based Airware, has raised more than $40 million so far, and this year the company launched its autopilot, ground control software and cloud-based management technologies. Downey started Airware in 2011, but the drive came from his undergraduate experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While there he started a student operation to build a UAS as part of a competition led by the AUVSI trade group. “We wanted a UAV that is flexible, so that each year we could change things and update it,” he says. “As we looked to the electronics that were developed for military UAVs and were available for students, the products worked well but were limited in what you could do with them – you couldn’t change them, you couldn’t add software through an application programming interface, you couldn’t change the camera, all those kinds of things. “We also looked at about ten open source projects that were customisable but lacked reliability and weren’t architected to be professional systems. So we designed everything from scratch – our own electronics, flight control software and so on. It took a long time, and we came second-to-last place in the competition because building all the pieces had distracted us from the competition criteria. So the lesson I Nick Flaherty talks to the founder and CEO of commercial UAV software company Airware about the organisation’s ethos and his views on the industry US enterprise Airware has developed an autopilot hardware and software that works with fixed-wing as well rotary and hybrid UAVs Autumn 2015 | Unmanned Systems Technology