Unmanned Systems Technology 010 | nuTonomy driverless taxi | Embedded computing | HFE International marine powertrain | Space vehicles | Performance monitoring | Commercial UAV Show Asia report

79 Commercial UAV Show Asia | Report Infinium Robotics is developing a number of rotary UAVs for commercial applications beyond the conventional sectors for unmanned vehicle products. Rather than developing for established UAV surveying markets such as agriculture or infrastructure surveillance, its projects include the Infinium Serve UAS for bringing meals and beverages to restaurant customers, the Infinium Wader for swarm-navigated UAV light- shows, and the Infinium Scan for indoor scanning and physical stock-taking. The Scan is a quadcopter that uses a barcode scanner to check inventories on warehouse shelves during flight. “95% of warehouses still use barcodes, as they are much cheaper than RFID,” Alejandro Alonso-Puig told us. “We use different kinds of readers to detect and read tags, and send this information to warehouse management systems to update the inventory.” To ensure safe flight between warehouse aisles where GPS cannot be used, the Scan is equipped with Lidar, sonar, radar and optical flow sensors to aid the onboard IMU, although exact specifications are currently undisclosed. Overwatch Imaging presented its TK family of stabilised camera systems for small and medium-sized long- endurance UAVs. They are designed with commercial and civil end-users in mind, and can be customised on request. The company’s multi-spectral payload for precision agriculture vegetation survey features multiple 5 MP global shutter CMOS cameras, with visible and near-infrared spectral bands available, creates real-time normalised difference vegetation index maps and is compatible with standard GIS software. A payload for fire detection and fire perimeter mapping missions is also available, using a colour camera along with a temperature-calibrated infrared camera suited to outdoor thermal mapping. The system autonomously detects fires and hotspots, and creates a map of those thermal detections in real time on board the aircraft. The company is also working on very high resolution camera systems for inspections of rail lines and other industrial infrastructure. In addition to a range of customisable imaging cameras, a few products of common architecture are available, as Overwatch’s Greg Davis explained. “We have a common processing module that uses an Nvidia Jetson TX1 processor optimised for GPU parallel processing of imagery, and we run our custom software on it while packaging in with that some custom electronics and solid-state drives for storage and other electrical tasks. We also have interchangeable plug-and-play imaging modules that are sized for different customers, and bring different levels of spatial resolution, electromagnetic spectrum content and image processing results for different jobs,” he said. Belgian start-up Unifly has developed UniflyDTMS (Drone Traffic Management System), a software application based on the concept of system-wide information management for UAV operators, civil aviation authorities, air traffic control, government agencies and so on. In designing the program, input was taken from air traffic controllers, pilots, flight dispatchers and software developers within and outside the company, as Unifly sought to address the need to safely integrate unmanned aviators into present-day manned aviation systems, where UAS operators can be overwhelmed by the number of safety standards and regulations that need to be accounted for. “UAV pilots and operators can create a block of airspace and check if they are allowed to fly there,” said Unmanned Systems Technology | October/November 2016 Overwatch is developing high-resolution camera systems for inspecting rail lines Unifly’s Pro version of its UAV traffic management system