Uncrewed Systems Technology 046

Octopus ISR Systems Epsilon 180MG ISR payload The most advanced surveillance system 4 sensor – 4K EO, MWIR, LRF, LP payload 180(D) x 215(H) MM 3.25 KG Installation: Nose or belly mounted Watch video presentation: To scan QR code and see the video, open your phone’s camera application and point it steadily for 2-3 seconds towards the QR Code. Onboard h.265 compression / Stabilization in 3 axis / Real time Target GEO location / MGRS system support / Onboard target tracker / Moving Target Indicator / Onboard video recording 32GB / Unicast and Multicast video stream / Picture in Picture dual video / Installation: nose or belly mounted. www.octopus-isr.com have done it with just camera and radar. “As soon as we got to vehicle-to- vehicle passing though, the Lidar became absolutely essential, and Luminar’s tech was crucial to providing high-speed data and a form factor compact enough to fit into a race cockpit. You can’t have a large, rotating device like a Lidar hanging off of a racecar doing 170 mph, it needs to be built into the skin of the vehicle. Lidars have to fit into the aerodynamic and aesthetic profile of production vehicles too, and they have to be capable of handling very high speeds and vibration.” As an automotive-grade Lidar, the Hydra H3 has been designed to optimise resolution at range, to prevent different types of road accidents. To function accordingly, Luminar chose an architecture that combines a spinning polygon mirror with a vertically tilting mirror in order to direct the laser towards areas of interest as needed. “The architecture and design of the sensor is key to getting the range we need with the 25 W power consumption we have, and the FoV means three of them can cover 360 º around the vehicle so they can determine out to 200 m if they have free space for any kind of manoeuvre,” Jefferson notes. “You might not need that on the track – even at 180 mph, or 80 m/s, you have room to manoeuvre in less than 200 m, but there’s no minimum in terms of seeing something adjacent to the car.” The laser itself is a Class 1, eye-safe beam. It has a 26 º vertical FoV and a 120 º horizontal FoV for producing 3D data on where objects are, how far away, how quickly they are being approached, and what road and lane boundaries there are. Data on these and other factors is output in a format designed to ensure the teams can use the sensor effectively for path- planning and decision-making in real time. “The Hydra sensors are expensive, but we felt it was really worth donating them to the IAC,” Jefferson says. “While the pylons [Mitchell] mentioned were actually pretty huge, if we’re to safely achieve faster speeds and more kinds of passing in the future, we need to be able to recognise something as small as a tyre, a slick or a part that’s fallen off one of the other cars.” Onboard autonomy and computation As announced in October 2022, as part of the AV-21’s recent technology refresh it has been upgraded to use the Autera from dSpace as its main computer, the primary reason for the upgrade being some connectivity issues that could not be resolved through the previous computer. The Autera has also been designed specifically for users engaging in data- driven r&d for autonomous driving applications – another factor making it a good match for the teams – logging up to 50 Gbit/s onto a 64 Tbyte storage IAC AV-21 | Dossier