Uncrewed Systems Technology 049 - April/May 2023

Marine Advanced Robotics WAM-V | Dossier UAV fromOverwatch Aero to identify illegal fishing in protected marine areas, where we autonomously homed in on a boat and zoomed in with the UAV’s camera to see precisely what the boat was doing,” Gundersen recounts. “The boat was fishing legally, but we could see individual lobsters on its deck while maintaining a considerable distance and degree of stealth from them. The whole idea with monitoring for illegal fishing is that you’re supposed to gather irrefutable evidence of criminals in the act, which you can then take to court and charge the crew with.” The following years have seen this USV-UAV teaming capability become more mature, and includes major collaborations with Planck Aero using the latter’s Shearwater UAV ( UST 25, April/May 2019) for its ability to land on and launch frommoving platforms. More than 100 autonomous launches and recoveries of Planck’s UAV were performed from the WAM-V over a 2-day period in the San Francisco bay in 2021 (with around 250 lb of equipment on the USV fully supporting the 2 lb UAV), to show that such operations could be performed repeatably and without human intervention. As Mehlman explains, “That involves not just good autopilots but a lot of consistent and intelligent comms between the USV and UAV, for things like planning recovery manoeuvres when the UAV’s battery or fuel runs low, or communicating wind speeds and directions from the USV’s wind sensor to the UAV. That means the latter can determine its best approach and rotor commands for a safe landing.” The kind of mesh or swarm the team creates will vary according to end-users’ requirements. Mehlman notes that while command links between the USV and its GCS work very well – particularly given the large and powerful radios the We added a rigid horizontal structure on top of the hulls, which allowed us to reduce the pressure in the hulls so they could better absorb wave motions North American Sales & Support San Diego, CA | www.hiteccs.com 60.0kgf·cm 20mm Case MDB961WP-CAN WIDE OPERATION VOLTAGE 8.0~32.0V WATERPROOF CASE RATING IP67 MULTIPLE COMMAND PROTOCOLS AVAILABLE DroneCAN & CAN 2.0 A/B Parameters List DENVER, CO | MAY 8 - 11 #4322 COME VISIT OUR BOOTH