Unmanned Systems Technology 026 I Tecdron TC800-FF I Propellers I USVs I AUVSI 2019 part 1 I Robby Moto UAVE I Singular Aircraft FlyOx I Teledyne SeaRaptor I Simulation & Testing I Ocean Business 2019 report

78 the autopilot. The bus system, electronic control unit for the engines, the power management, 17 separate boards – all that was designed, produced and programmed by us,” Lostao says. “I don’t want to develop autopilots, as they are off-the-shelf systems and are changing frequently from the technological perspective. Also pilots need to be very well trained in the system.” The system architecture allows the team to integrate any type of autopilot on the market into the aircraft. “We took control of all the systems and subsystems in the plane, and got just the vector for the autopilot, so now we can install whatever autopilot the customer asks for. There are different ones from Canada, Spain and China,” Lostao says. “The core functionality of the plane is not the autopilot though, or the energy equations, it’s the main subsystems such as the hydraulics and power management,” he adds. The same is true of the comms systems. “The radio links are off-the- shelf, as every country asks for a different frequency,” he explains. The architecture is such that an autopilot is not actually necessary. “You can put a direct input to our systems in the plane via the radio link; you don’t need the autopilot,” Lostao says. This comes with problems though, as pilots have struggled with remote operation during testing, says Lostao. “One plane was working properly, but it crashed because the pilot was a couple of seconds behind what the plane was doing.” The problem was the latency for the pilot. This is a maximum of 0.1 s, which June/July 2019 | Unmanned Systems Technology The air-freight version of the FlyOx evolved from a design developed for firefighting. This came about from conversations in airports between Luis Carrillo Lostao, founder of Singular Aircraft, and an experienced pilot and his colleagues. After a friend was killed in a firefighting operation, Lostao and the others started to talk about using an autonomous aircraft. An amphibious craft made a lot of sense for firefighting, as it could land on water to refill its water tanks, rather than going back to an airport. This led to the design of an airframe that could land on a lake or river and then open its bay doors to scoop up water. The original proposal centred on night-time firefighting operations because pilots are often not allowed to fly then for safety reasons. As a result, the FlyOx was automated, using IR and EO cameras as the main sensors. The problem is that landing autonomously on water is not easy, and it is even harder in the dark. Most of the problems pilots have with landing on water comes from the glassy nature of the surface – they don’t realise exactly where it is so they can’t establish where to land safely. Another problem is that the water’s surface is never at the same level, so a vertical radar is used to provide an accurate height. This adds a second control loop to the one used by the cameras. That then has to be integrated with the control systems for safely opening the bay doors and refilling the water tanks, then opening the doors to release the water at the correct location to fight the fire. This then led to the development of the version described here for aid agencies such as the World Food Programme. Heritage of the FlyOx airframe Singular originally developed the FlyOx platform for firefighting, releasing water from large bay doors. That design was adapted to enable it to drop aid from the air in rugged packages