25 true. In the 10 years since we started documenting the technical achievements of the autonomous systems world, thousands of new companies and products have been spawned, bringing myriad new perspectives and ideas for advancing the technology. Even outsiders taking cursory glances at this vibrant industry can feel overwhelmed at all the new strains of electronics, avionics, powertrains, software solutions andmore critical subsystems that have been rethought in unprecedented ways, with the specific purpose of providing uncrewed vehicles with new levels of intelligence and reliability. Given all of these, and the many autonomous vehicle missions and classes that have emerged, we have chosen to use this occasion of our 50th issue to take a short look back and recount some of the key trends and evolutions in uncrewed systems and technologies that have defined this past decade the most. VTOL-transitioning aircraft Before 2014, our founders researched the industry and saw two particular features defining how the shape of the uncrewed world could potentially change in the years ahead. The first was that our pages would be almost exclusively UAVs – our first cover story having been on the catapult-launched Penguin C UAV from UAV Factory, now Edge Autonomy – as back then, the uncrewed world was indeed heavily dominated by UAVs. Growth in UAV engineering and manufacturing, many expected, would eclipse all other uncrewed vehicle types. It hasn’t turned out like that though, and we have in fact featured hundreds of professionally designed UGVs, UUVs and USVs in detail over the past 10 years. But their core instincts were right in that UAVs remain a hallmark of the industry and a focal point for much of its innovation. Naturally, if something is small, light and energy-efficient enough to work in a UAV, it will fit the SWaP-constraints of most other vehicle types. With somuch innovation inUAVs, a fewmajor trends are easy to notice. The most visible of these is the rise of VTOLtransitioning architectures, which have gone fromserving a rare niche to becoming a common sight at every UAV expo. Although the first VTOL-transitioning UAV we featured in detail was the Alti Transition (issue 8, June/July 2016), our first discussions about doing so were actually with Wingcopter. That eventually bore fruit in the form of our cover story on its Wingcopter 178 UAV in issue 24 (February/March 2019). These two early cases showcased two quite different approaches to the problem of combining fixed-wing flight with a VTOL and hovering capability. In the German UAV, a quad-tiltrotor mechanismwas developed in which each tiltrotor used a servo actuator to move its motor/prop-rotor pod by 90o. Alti’s Transition on the other hand uses four fixed, vertically oriented rotors installed on twin booms (which run backwards into an inverted vee-tail) combined with a rear-mounted pusher prop. That has become one of the most widely adopted configurations among UAV manufacturers. Both companies are still operating. Alti UAS has since launched the Reach, a larger variation on the Transition trends Uncrewed Systems Technology | June/July 2023 50 issues of Uncrewed Systems Technology Special review Our first cover dossier was on the Penguin C, which was a contemporary of early successful UAVs such as the Insitu ScanEagle and AAI Aerosonde (Courtesy of UAV Factory, now Edge Autonomy)
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