Uncrewed Systems Technology 047 l Aergility ATLIS l AI focus l Clevon 1 UGV l Geospatial insight l Intergeo 2022 report l AUSA 2022 report I Infinity fuel cell l BeeX A.IKANBILIS l Propellers focus I Phoenix Wings Orca

61 Geospatial surveys | Insight CHCNAV. “Its endurance is about 2.5 hours, making it suitable for large- scale mapping projects, and it’s fully electric, with a 27,000 mAh lithium- polymer battery weighing 5.7 kg that can be fully recharged in just under 100 minutes.” The UAV has a 14 kg MTOW, a 2.53 m wingspan, and a length of 1.21 m from nose to tail. It features four upward-facing electric motors mounted on booms that extend from its wings, and a fifth electric motor installed at the rear in a pusher configuration. The HC-D2 weighs 960 g (fitting comfortably within the P330’s 2 kg payload capacity) and its cameras are configured with four oblique-pointed lenses (each tilted to 45 º and with a 35 mm focal length) surrounding one centrally mounted nadir-pointing lens with a 25 mm focal length. Each camera captures images at 24.3 MP resolution with a 0.8-second maximum exposure interval, and two integrated 640 Gbyte storage drives for carrying image data. BVLOS mapping Designing uncrewed systems around all-electric powertrains is useful to operators in the geospatial world, not only from a sustainability perspective but because battery-electric configurations are inherently simpler to maintain than IC engine-powered alternatives. However, as the wider world recognises the importance of using UAVs for mapping and inspecting nearby as well as distant geographical assets, the ability of battery-electric UAVs to perform BVLOS missions given their limited flight endurances is being called into question. German company Beagle Systems has therefore developed its Beagle M UAV and ancillary equipment with the aim of enabling reliable, routine, uncrewed all- electric BVLOS survey operations. The company’s founders identified markets where UAS capabilities are lacking, determining that heavy industrial survey capacities were at the fore. “Most companies seeking geospatial data just want the data, not a drone or a fleet of them that they have to manage, and for organisations managing really large infrastructure assets like rail networks, solar farms and powerline grids, there’s not really a commercially established service model to help them,” says Oliver Lichtenstein, co-founder of Beagle Systems. With an eye towards creating such a model, Beagle embarked on two courses of development. One was to obtain all the necessary regulatory approvals for flying in the strictly regulated airspaces that tend to be above such wide-area infrastructures. “That’s key to being able to fly to practically any place in the EU to provide data,” Lichtenstein adds. “Then we started designing and building a UAV which would conform with all the requirements of the drafts for EU drone regulations. I took part in the discussions with the German board for unmanned aviation, so we had direct insights into what government ministers wanted in terms of components and design qualities. “We saw from those discussions that building and selling UAVs won’t work for some key industries, because for regulatory approvals the UAS operator will need to be able to submit numerous technical insights that the manufacturer won’t always want to give away, such as proprietary software or mechanical details. But if we build it ourselves, we can answer every question about why it’s safe to fly.” As a result, Beagle is Germany’s only regular long-range UAV operator. Its flights include surveys for Westenergie, a subsidiary of E.ON that operates much of western Germany’s power grid. Missions include routine high- resolution surveys of power pylons, and on-demand flights using an API developed in-house for interfacing with Westenergie’s warning system. That enables the company to see when and where a fault such as a short-circuit has occurred, so that a Beagle M can take off within 60 seconds of the associated alarm and fly with an automatically Uncrewed Systems Technology | December/January 2023 The Beagle M can be launched, recovered and charged via any Beagle Hangar close to or away from an asset needing a survey (Courtesy of Beagle Systems)