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75 (running at 5 Hz), which can detect and track objects up to 4 km away. This gives a reaction time of 10-15 s at a closing speed of 500 knots. The system identifies objects in the air – against the background of the sky – and tracks them. Objects that move like aircraft are tracked, while others such as birds are ignored, although there is an alternative use for the system to detect possible imminent bird strikes on passenger aircraft. The other processor core can be used for weather detection using the camera running at 1 Hz. This algorithm is driven by the colour of the clouds, and can track cloud features, particularly rain and ice, up to 15 miles away. This can give the unmanned system or a remote operator more information for taking evasive action. One issue for installing cameras around an unmanned aircraft is the weight. Holes in the airframe to mount them actually increase overall weight, as the holes have to be supported, so three arrays of 30 sensors is lighter than five separate arrays of five sensors, for example. The system is also being combined with an onboard map database of safe areas to land in real time. This takes into account the glide path and any potential known obstructions, and tells the image array where to look for temporary obstructions such as vehicles, people or animals that may be in the way. All this was part of the Astraea European project that finished in September 2015. Vulcan UAV has developed a prototype craft, the AirLift 2, which it says will have a flight time of up to 30 minutes with a 30 kg payload, making it suitable for heavy-lift applications such as wire pulls for power line replacement, maritime search and rescue, bathymetric Lidar, and transporting ground-penetrating radar and other heavy sensors and payloads into hard-to-reach places. The design includes a new generation of 8 kW brushless motors from KDE, which use KDE’s new self-adjusting bearing system aimed at significantly increasing the lifetime of the motors beyond the current 50-100 hours. The aircraft is powered by four 22,000 mAh 12s lithium batteries. The AirLift 2 platform is undergoing test flights towards the end of 2015, with certification testing in 2016. Antrica has launched a multi-channel video encoder for airborne and ground unmanned system encoding and streaming applications over IP. It is billed as the world’s smallest dual-channel H.264 HD/SD encoding or decoding solution, weighing less than 43 g. The ANT-1772 Micro consumes less than 4 W of power for 1080p30 encoding plus simultaneous PAL/NTSC encoding. It provides simultaneous low-latency streaming of two sources from HD-SDI and analogue composite video signals, together with two-way serial data, audio and Micro SD card recording onboard. The 45 x 45 x 18 mm board can be integrated easily into a UAV design and offers extended temperature and voltage range for operation. As well as encoding, the unit can act as a hardware decoder with HD-SDI, Micro HDMI and composite outputs. “Antrica has been providing an extensive range of video encoding and decoding solutions to a variety of applications and markets for over 15 years, but this is Antrica’s first solution specifically designed for the UAV market and meets new standards for miniaturisation,” said Les Litwin, sales director of Antrica. Unmanned Systems Technology | Dec 2015/Jan 2016 Vulcan UAV says its AirLift 2 will carry a 30 kg payload and have a flight time of up to 30 minutes Antrica’s ANT-1722 is billed as the world’s smallest dual-channel video encoder/decoder