Unmanned Systems Technology 016 | Hydromea Vertex AUV | Power management systems | Unmanned Space Vehicles | Continental CD-155 turbodiesel | Swift 020 UAV | ECUs | DSEI 2017 Show report

Platform one 14 October/November 2017 | Unmanned Systems Technology Liquid Robotics has been making hardware and software improvements to its third generation of Wave Glider USV (writes Rory Jackson). “We’ve worked with the buoyancy and sturdiness of the vessel’s design, so we can carry system payloads that are 30% heavier and tow up to 1000 lb,” said Daniel Middleton at Liquid Robotics. “Along with some further mechanical fortifying of the craft, we can now take it through more extreme sea states – sea state 6 and greater – so it now has more stability.” Tests conducted off the coast of Iceland have confirmed the platform’s ability to operate in sea state 8 (10 m waves). In addition, its solar cells have also been uprated to collect 15% more power, with battery upgrades to provide 40% more battery energy storage. The company has also begun applying a copper-based coating to the hull to address the issue of biofouling. “After a few days in the water, the copper oxidises and improves the ability to remove barnacles and similar growths that can build up over time,” Middleton said. The adoption of an open, Java-based Linux operating system allows the Wave Glider’s software to be configurable by end-users, enabling quick integration of new subsystems, behaviours and working in a fleet. USV takes to higher seas Unmanned vessels The Wave Glider has been upgraded to withstand conditions up to sea state 8 Microsemi has released engineering samples of the first high-speed, radiation- tolerant field programmable gate array (FPGA) to use a ceramic quad flat pack (CQFP) package (writes Nick Flaherty). The new CQ352 package, which conforms to the CQFP industry standard for space applications, features 352 pins for more cost-effective integration than higher pin-count packages, and is the only CQFP package available for high- speed radiation-tolerant FPGAs. The CQFP package is well-understood for high-reliability manufacturing, making it easier to assemble onto printed circuit boards than ceramic column grid array packages. That makes it suitable for control applications which do not require a high number of I/Os – including satellites, space launch vehicles, planetary orbiters and landers, and deep space probes, as well as other designs with frequent switching and a high number of temperature cycles, which can be challenging for CCGA packages. It is being used for Microsemi’s 300 MHz RTG4 FPGA, which has 166, 3.3 V general-purpose I/Os, four embedded SpaceWire clock and data recovery circuits and four high-speed serialisation/deserialisation transceivers that can be used for either external physical coding sublayer or PCIE protocols. The chip has the same 150,000 look- up tables, flip-flops with built-in triple module redundancy, digital signal processing math blocks and static RAM blocks as the existing CCGA package that has 1657 pins. The chip can still operate after a total ionising dose of more than 100 kilorads. • Space vehicles insight, page 42 First fast FPGAs in flat pack Space systems