Unmanned Systems Technology 009 | Ocean Aero Submaran S10 | Simulation and testing | Farnborough report | 3W-110xi b2 TS HFE FI | USVs | Data storage | Eurosatory/UGS 2016 report

68 T he increased capacity and reduced size and cost of modern storage media has allowed longer missions that can collect greater volumes of data, increasing the versatility of unmanned platforms, and the storage makes possible a number of different applications – airborne and ground mission data acquisition systems; flight data recording and analysis; video, radar and EW recording; and custom embedded computing. Most of the data captured by smaller, hand-launched craft is either saved on the sensor device itself using the small data cards found in commercial cameras and phones, or transmitted wirelessly back to a base station. Such craft have short flight times, so even though they are capturing some high-resolution images they do not need a lot of storage. For operators of these platforms the performance and health of the vehicle are not as important because of their relatively low cost, but with any of the medium or large platforms the operator will have a growing desire to store Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) data, detailing performance Data storage is at the heart of mission performance for unmanned platforms, and one technology is set to dominate. Mark Venables explains why Saved in a flash August/September 2016 | Unmanned Systems Technology The growing volume of data created by UAVs, allied with improved communications bandwidth, is increasing the requirement for off-vehicle storage (Courtesy of Thales)