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43 control stations developed for its UAVs. While UAV Factory will concentrate on developing craft such as the Penguin UAV profiled in our first issue, this new Octopus division is expanding its offerings with a tracking antenna and a gimbal launched at the show. The new gimbal is known as the Epsilon 140, in reference to its 140 mm diameter, and contains stabilised day and night cameras. Ozolins noted that the package includes what he describes as advanced image stabilisation and a very powerful video processor. He added that the Epsilon 140 is the only micro-gimbal on the market which has an onboard moving target indicator. “When you have a wide field of view, a person, for example, or a car or an animal a couple of kilometres away might account for only a couple of pixels. But this software identifies any movement between that object and the background, highlights it for the operator, and having ‘seen’ it the operator can then zoom into it to see if it is of interest. Flyability announced the launch of “the world’s first collision-tolerant flying robot”, Elios (previously known as Gimball) at the show to herald the 700 g, spherically caged quadcopter’s transition to serial production by the end of the year. This follows five years of development through seven design generations for Elios, whose diameter of less than 400 mm enables it to fit through manholes and access hatches to inspect confined spaces in power plants, pipe and cable tunnels, and ships’ holds for example. The Swiss company’s co-founder Patrick Thévoz told us that the cage is made from carbon fibre-reinforced plastic rods joined into hexagonal modules by 3D-printed reinforced plastic nodes. (These nodes are the only remaining 3D-printed parts, as the company is moving to faster techniques such as injection moulding for mass production.) The modules are held together by ties so that damaged sections can be replaced quickly in the field, while the rods have a softer coating to protect from impacts with sharp edges. The cage is designed to absorb impacts with objects at speeds up to the robot’s software- limited maximum of 15 kph. Inside the cage, the UAV is mounted on a three-axis gimbal that mechanically decouples it, allowing the cage to roll over or around objects while the UAV with its HD video and thermal cameras remain stable, turn on the spot with the robot and tilt independently to be aimed at inspection targets. The 2.4 GHz radio link works in a licence-free band and uses multiple antennae, COFDM and advanced signal processing “to ensure that we will not lose the signal as soon as we enter a metallic environment or get out of the line of sight”, Thévoz said. Control software has to be adapted to a robot that experiences very strong disturbances to its attitude from collisions. Also, the aerodynamics of a robot compact enough to fit into such a small sphere are complex because of interactions between overlapping rotor blades, their close coupling to the body of the UAV, their high rotational speed and thrust density, and the aerodynamic effects of the cage. A new development from MicroPilot, Kyle Hayes reported, is a tablet/smartphone version of its well- established ground control software. This, he said, is in response to customer demand – using the software on a tablet or even a phone rather than a PC gives the operator more freedom to move around while operating a craft. This version, still in development at the time of the show, is fully touchscreen, and Hayes demonstrated how a waypoint can be relocated using this approach. The design is such that thumb control is the primary tool, so that a tablet can at all times be held firmly in both hands. “You can control the flight, operate a payload and so on using your thumbs,” Hayes noted. AUVSI’s Xponential | Show report Unmanned Systems Technology | June/July 2016 The Epsilon 140 from UAV Factory has stabilised night and day cameras