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

98 T he proliferation of small consumer UAVs in the early 2000s gave rise to very small, lightweight camera gimbals, which in turn propagated highly useful tools and expertise for engineering miniaturised motors, control boards, housings, windows and other related parts. Nowadays, the rise of highly sophisticated and powerful autonomous vehicles in every terrestrial realm has pushed the creation of new gimbal models that strike a middle ground between the consumer UAV gimbals and the far bulkier, heavier ones of crewed aircraft. These new systems enable long-range surveillance, mapping and other missions by commercial, civil and defence operators, who now make up much of the customer base for uncrewed systems. This new generation of gimbals incorporate the latest high-resolution EO, and cooled and uncooled IR cameras, designed for viewing targets more than 10 km away. They also carry the latest technologies in stabilisation, video processing and AI data analytics for example. These latter technologies are enabling the gimbals to achieve more sophisticated classifications and higher resolutions of data than ever, and in real time. Advances in them are dictated by the skills of software engineers and the quantity and quality of processors that can be packed into the minimal dimensions of each gimbal. With more processors comes more heat though, as well as less space in which components for extracting that heat can be fitted. But as awareness grows of what uncrewed systems can do for all sorts of applications, so too does the demand for increasingly intelligent and reliable gimbals. That demand has therefore added another layer of new trends and technologies to this latest generation of gimbals, to fulfil the need to add intelligence and reliability to them without adding weight or heat. These trends and technologies first emerge in the design and prototyping phase of a new gimbal. Design and testing The actual tools for designing and simulating new gimbals have changed little over the past 5 years. The nature of the autonomous systems market is such that with every week a high-end gimbal maker will begin planning a new project, with some customer wanting to integrate, say, a new IR camera, connector, vibration damper, video encoder and so on. The effect of this is that the most successful gimbal companies are generally those who have adopted a highly modular or open (or both) architecture with great swapability of internal components. This modularity shortens the design process and lead times of any new or custom gimbals. An all-new system can quickly be conceived by calculating high-level ‘budgets’ for weight and power consumption, which then feed into whichever other parameters are critical for the intended customer. Those figures Rory Jackson charts the latest advances in gimbals technologies and offers some pointers to future trends Sight lines August/September 2022 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Today’s gimbals are being designed as highly intelligent systems and packaged with the latest GPUs and microcontrollers from the world’s top processor companies (Courtesy of UXV Technologies)