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

59 taken from UAVs and other moving platforms, and this year it unveiled its second original aircraft for that purpose. “Our new Astro UAV is in many ways a smaller and more fully integrated repackaging of our Alta X, for users who want to transport our systems around the world more easily,” explains Tabb Firchau, president of Freefly Systems. The first Astro comes with a 61 MP Sony a7R IV camera (capable of up to 240 MP stills or 4K video), and it can fly with that for 25 minutes. Other versions will have sensors such as the Wiris Pro or FLIR Duo Pro R. The Astro’s batteries have been designed to integrate 21700 lithium-ion cylindrical cells and Freefly’s proprietary BMS. It also uses Auterion’s Skynode avionics and connectivity suite, Freefly having designed and validated its own hardware in-house to conform to the Skynode’s reference designs. “For our cycle-life tests on the Astro’s subsystems, we simulated drop tests, where a robot would drop the Astro over and over to see if the legs, booms or other parts would break,” Firchau adds. “We also redesigned our motor controllers to make them much faster, which is crucial for driving very large propellers for the platform’s size while still having high control during extreme filming manoeuvres.” Agriculture Over the years, we have observed that UAVs built for crop spraying make for larger and heavier designs than most on the market, and Pyka’s Pelican aircraft is no different. This all-electric fixed- wing UAS has an 11.5 m wingspan and measures 6 m in length, with a payload capacity of up to 317 kg. “Our company has been building full- size airframes for around 5 years now, and our technology and designs are essentially at full maturity and ready for type certification,” says Garrett Rini, mechanical design team lead at US-based Pyka. “The Pelican weighs 272 kg empty and 600 kg full with a 340 litre spray tank. We use a system of swappable battery packs in the nose, with endurance not being much of an issue as agricultural spray aircraft typically land quite often to refill their other tanks with fertiliser or pesticide chemicals.” Up to 13 kWh of batteries are installed on the crop spray variant of the Pelican, with a future version to be designed for cargo deliveries that will integrate bigger batteries and have a larger fuselage to accommodate them and a heavier payload. The aircraft has three 25 kW electric motors, which drive three carbon composite, fixed-pitch tractor propellers, one sitting on the tail and the other two on the wings. Future versions will have four such motors, powering four propellers: two in front of the wing and two in the back of the wing. UAVs | Insight Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2022 Pyka’s Pelican is engineered for autonomous crop spraying – customer deliveries will start next year (Courtesy of Pyka)