Issue 45 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Aug/Sept 2022 Tidewie USV Tupan | Performance monitoring | Bayonet 350 | UAVs insight | Xponential 2022 | ULPower UL350i and UL350iHPS | Elroy Air Chaparral | Gimbals | Clogworks Dark Matter

26 Dossier | TideWise USV Tupan offshore energy facilities, waterways, new ports and other infrastructure work due to unfold across Brazil through to 2030 informed a clear business plan that supported our first investment, allowing us to build our first product, the USV Tupan.” The USV Tupan is a 4.95 m-long, 1.78 m-wide autonomous vessel, with a 0.6 m draft, a fully laden displacement of 1400 kg, and weighing 1100 kg when unladen. It has been designed to fit in a 20 ft container, as well as in cargo planes and to achieve dimensional compliance with regulations on the transport of items on Brazilian roads. It carries a hybrid-electric powertrain that enables a top speed of 6 knots, a turning radius of 10 m at 4 knots or 0 m with differential thrust, and a maximum practical endurance of 12 days. It can also carry payloads of up to 200 kg of sensors and, unusually, a secondary uncrewed system such as a UAV or ROV. The main benefits of seating, launching and recovering a multi-rotor UAV from a platform on the Tupan are twofold. The first is that the UAV’s high vantage point allows it to rapidly detect distant oil spills on the water’s surface, which the USV can then sample and test for more precise details after recovering the aircraft and navigating to the reported position of the slick. Second, the UAV’s ability to fly high – well above the maximum height of wind farms and oil rigs – allows for close and precise inspection of such infrastructure from top to bottom for cracks, fouling or anything else that could be harmful to continued operations. The USV can simultaneously conduct surface- and subsurface-level surveys for structural problems, be it with EO/IR, sonar, Lidar or other sensors too heavy for the UAV. The Tupan’s ability to act as a mothership for UAVs as well as ROVs lends it to many other uses for commercial, civil and defence customers for tasks such as hydrographic surveys, environmental monitoring and surveillance. “It’s a multi-purpose USV capable of interacting with different sensors and uncrewed systems, and the hardware has been designed so that we can change from one job to another within hours,” says Coelho. “The vessel has a moon pool [a payload integration space extending from the vessel’s bottom to its deck] with a footprint of 580 x 560 mm and a height of 1355 mm through the hull, while the USV’s electrical system can provide up to 3 kW of 220 V AC to the payloads,” he adds. “Also, functionalities and characteristics of the USV’s powertrain, such as low roll, low energy consumption, low noise and of course high reliability and redundancy, make it particularly desirable for multiple tasks.” Development timeline The Tupan was developed over the course of 15 months, beginning soon after the company’s formation and first investment round. Initial concept sketches were produced in May 2019, and the first sea trials came in mid-2020. “The Tupan was really meant to be the first workhorse for the company’s r&d, proof of concept, customer and investor attention, and so on, even from those early days,” Coelho says. “We are not new to ocean robots and USV design. Sylvain has been doing robot software for 15 years now, and I have been designing and building USVs for 10 years. We also have other team members who have been developing USVs for several years in different countries, so we have a very robust design methodology.” This methodology began with listing key project requirements, both commercial and operational, which was performed in 2 weeks. After that, the concept was generated in 4 weeks, after which TideWise executed a preliminary design review, then a round of basic designs, followed by a more detailed design round. To meet its project deadlines, the detailed design phase August/September 2022 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The Tupan’s first sea trials were in Rio’s Guanabara Bay in August 2020