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straight as it begins to leave the carrier. Other issues were that occasionally the box would move around in the compartment, and the left and right air brake would jam on the cargo bay frame. The solution to these findings lay in refining the guide rails, Koperberg says, which involved adding extra guides for the air brakes. With those in place, the box can be dropped and the air brakes deployed reliably at speeds of up to 110 kph. The air brakes don’t deploy at precisely the same time because the front one is directly exposed to the airflow as the box exits and is therefore held against the box briefly before adopting the same angle as the other three. Further airborne drop-testing was carried out at the DLR’s recently opened UAVs airfield at Kochstedt in Germany. The tests helped confirm the behaviour of the box on exit and the strength of the air brakes, and also provided data critical to the development of the algorithm. Over a large number of drops, Wings For Aid recorded the Sinus test aircraft’s speed and height above the ground, the wind speed and direction, the moment at which the doors opened and where each box landed, to calculate its trajectory. The relationships between those factors, along with the CFD data and trajectory equations, were then used to help optimise the algorithm’s accuracy. Careful ground testing before airborne tests revealed the need for a number of refinements to the design of the box, one of which was eliminating the cords that were used to attach the ends of the air brakes to the base of the box to help maintain the correct angle at launch. These proved tricky to set up, and weren’t strong enough for the added forces from horizontal speed anyway, so they were replaced with a structural member incorporated into the folding scheme to maintain the required air brake angle. Wings For Aid MiniFreighter 8/500FW | Dossier We can go up to a height of 1 km, or 3000 ft, and the behaviour of the box will still be similar and the contents will remain intact American-Made, Cybersecure from the ground up Integrated, onboard edge computing capabilities Open-Source or customized autopilot software IronClad Secure Controllers for Unmanned Systems asymmetric.com/ironclad What’s protecting your platform? The new flexibility: SP-180 SRE hybrid MADE IN GERMANY • E-drive-mode for starting and emergency back up • Rotary-mode as shaft power • Boost-mode for max. power (depends on battery size) • Charging battery dep. power from rotary (range extender) SCAN FOR 360° VIEW www.skypower.online Sky Power GmbH · Hollerstrasse 12 · 61350 Bad Homburg · Germany · Phone: +49 (0) 6172-2654258 · [email protected]