Unmanned Systems Technology 014 | Quantum Tron | Radio links and telemetry | Unmanned Aerial Vehicles | Protonex fuel cell | Ancillary systems | AUVSI 2017 Show report

42 E ndurance and speed of operation are increasingly important for UAV operations. One way the endurance issue is being addressed is with hybrid designs that can take off and land vertically like a quadcopter but then operate horizontally like a fixed-wing craft. For a wide range of applications, being able to operate for longer times and cover more ground is testing the ingenuity of engineers. System designers and operators are also focusing on reducing the size and weight of the payload sensors to increase a UAV’s range. For example, in this latter respect, UAVs with lightweight hyperspectral sensors are being used to monitor the health of coral reefs. In one development, associate professor Felipe Gonzalez and his team at the Institute for Future Environments (IFE) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have captured high-resolution hyperspectral imagery of a reef in Western Australia. The 290 km long Ningaloo Reef is part of the Ningaloo Coast World Heritage site. Prof Gonzalez says, “Normal cameras record images in three bands of the visible spectrum – red, green and blue – and mixes those bands together to create colours as humans see them. “By comparison, the hyperspectral camera captures 270 bands in the visible and NIR [near-infrared] portions of the spectrum, providing far more detail than the human eye can see. And, UAV developers are making inroads into boosting the speed and flight times of their craft, as Nick Flaherty reports Long-distance runners June/July 2017 | Unmanned Systems Technology The Queensland University of Technology has developed a specialist gimbal for a lightweight hyperspectral camera (Courtesy of QUT REF)