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37 contact is lost or there is an emergency. That means the main thrust of autopilot innovation is in unmanned aircraft, although modular systems being designed for aircraft can also be customised for USVs and smaller land vehicles such as delivery robots. For unmanned aircraft, there is a move away from autopilots with a set of waypoints and perhaps a ‘return to base’ location to implementing more sophisticated navigation and control algorithms. These vary from curved paths for the waypoints to take account of obstacles or restricted areas, to autonomous operation, where the onboard system detects such obstacles and navigates around them. Autopilots also have to include situational awareness, identifying both fixed and moving obstacles to control the craft safely. An autopilot can include an automation module, where the operator can configure automatic actions to occur if an event such as a sensor failure or running out of power is detected. These can be for safety as well as autonomy. For example, if the comms link is lost for more than a couple of seconds, the craft could ascend to try to recover it. Alternatively, if the link is lost for more than 10 s then the craft could return to a home or initial location. Problems have occurred when the home location is substantially different from the location where the UAV is operating – this led to a UAV heading off 50 km out of control in Australia earlier in 2017. To tackle that, some autopilots allow the return point to be the point at which the system was initialised, rather than a preset home location. In a system architecture diagram the autopilot is right in the centre, taking inputs from sensors around the craft and issuing commands to the control surfaces, whether they are the rudder and ailerons in an aircraft, wheel motors in a land vehicle or a ship’s rudder. What the autopilot can Autopilots | Focus The autopilot can be seen as the heart of an unmanned system, whether it is an aircraft, a vessel at sea or a land vehicle Unmanned Systems Technology | December/January 2018 Sikorsky, now part of Lockheed Martin, is developing tailorable autonomous autopilot kit for fixed-wing aircraft as well as helicopters (Courtesy of Lockheed Martin)