Uncrewed Systems Technology 044 l Xer Technolgies X12 and X8 l Lidar sensors l Stan UGV l USVs insight l AUVSI Xponential 2022 l Cobra Aero A99H l Accession Class USV l Connectors I Oceanology International 2022

96 Focus | Connectors USB drives with ruggedised connectors that can be quickly un-mated could be vital for many autonomous applications. For example, UAVs that need to make quick and repeated mappings of an area – for instance in wildfire monitoring, warfare or disaster relief planning – could quickly dump their mapping and other mission data for post-processing on the ground before taking off again. The same goes for UUVs conducting back-to-back missions to find crashed airliners on the deep seabed, or critical leaks in subsea cables or oil pipelines. The connectors of such devices can of course also be designed with unique keys to prevent unauthorised access to their data. Design The biggest factor steering new connector designs is probably volume. OEMs need connectors (as well as wiring harnesses) to take up less and less space in their vehicles, to be able to make them lighter, with less drag and with more free space for payload volume. As this directly contrasts with the increased need for ruggedisation, a few significant design innovations are gaining traction. Some of these are ‘hybrid’ products that combine power and signal links within single connectors and harnesses. Designing these successfully depends hugely on close collaboration between the connector maker and the vehicle OEM, because an accurate understanding of the end-user’s voltage and current requirements is key for correctly sizing, spacing and insulating the pins, otherwise signal safety and integrity will suffer. Similarly, as UAVs get larger and the line with the growing eVTOL taxi market becomes blurred, OEMs are requiring higher and higher power throughput in their connectors without making them prohibitively large. What started as new demands for 50 A, 100 V connectors a few years ago has since evolved into a market seeking up to 300 A at far higher voltages. Designing and prototyping these takes skill and knowledge regarding conventional high-end connector design. Any soldering for instance requires a heat sink, or else the quantity of solder material risks melting the wires or contacts. Alternatively, for crimping to work with the hefty gauge of the sorts of wires needed to conduct hundreds of amps at once, such large connections should be crimped before the pins are loaded into the connector housing and epoxied in place. In the further pursuit of improving ruggedisation versus size, some developers have taken the step of combining male and female pins in individual plugs. The reason why this helps with size reduction is that the back end of each contact typically needs more space than the top end, so all-male connector plugs need more clearance than their female counterparts. These ‘hermaphroditic’ plugs therefore make far better use of space and bring down the overall form factor of the connectors. Such connectors can, however, be extremely challenging to engineer June/July 2022 | Uncrewed Systems Technology This compression gland penetrator uses a rubber seal that achieves high-pressure performance without the need for potting (Courtesy of Blue Robotics) Hybrid connectors combine power and data links into single housings to save considerably on weight and volume (Courtesy of Omnetics)