26 Special review 50 issues of Uncrewed Systems Technology with double the wingspan (6 m rather than 3) and an upscaled powertrain, making it capable of more than 10 hours of endurance and 150 km of range compared to the Transition’s 8 hours and 50 km. Wingcopter meanwhile now offers the 198 UAV, so-called for its wingspan in centimetres, as was its predecessor. The 198measures 152 cm long and has a 6 kg payload capacity, and now flies using eight motors – four tiltrotors, four fixed and vertically oriented rotors – all powered by 1.6 kWh of lithium-ion batteries. There are many reasons why VTOLtransitioning UAV companies began springing up and flourishing from 2015 onwards. In addition to electromechanics and autopilots advancing enough to handle the computationally intensive transition between hovering and flight, they give the ability to land in and take off from small spaces. That meant for instance that forest clearings for disaster relief operators, parking lots for logistics organisations, or helicopter pads (or even tighter spots) on oceangoing vessels could now be served by uncrewed aircraft. It also meant no more lengthy pre-launch maintenance and checklists required for crewed helicopters, along with all the associated costs of such larger vehicles. With so many use cases, demand very rapidly drove the inception of entirely new aircraft designs that were very unlike anything else. In mid-2017 (issue 15, August/September) we met up with Martin UAV (now Shield AI, which acquired the company in 2021) to discuss its V-Bat, still one of the only enginepowered tailsitters. The tailsitter configuration had effectively been discontinued in crewed aviation after multiple failed attempts during the 20th century to engineer and pilot them. However, the V-Bat’s use of a ducted fan for thrust, as well as robust control algorithms to use modern air data and inertial sensor technology with a high update rate meant it could pull off the challenging manoeuvres necessary for launching and landing such vehicles. This not only marked the first time uncrewed systems had resurrected a ‘dead’ aircraft type, but also found vital uses for it in the world. As a result, the V-Bat continues to win awards and contracts for service, particularly in maritime defence applications. Although navies and air forces have particularly stringent requirements for their UAVs, the V-Bat’s ducted fan powertrain configuration gives it a sizeable lifting capacity – 11.34 kg of payload out of a 57 kgMTOW is typical – as well as a 10 hour flight endurance or 45minutes of hover. Add to that its ability to performVTOL in any 3.65 x 3.65m space (as landing on its tail minimises its ground profile) and the result is an aerial surveillance tool capable of stationary hovering that can be used in a far wider variety of vessels than any crewed helicopter. In more recent times, Pterodynamics has gone further than exploring history’s forgotten aircraft designs, by inventing an entirely new one instead. Its Transwing series of UAVs were built with a unique transverse folding wing that made transitioning mechanically simple (with a single linear actuator responsible for the folding) and computationally simple, June/July 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology VTOL-transitioning has grown from being a rare niche in tiltrotors such as the Wingcopter 178 (Courtesy of Wingcopter)… …to being widespread among uncrewed aircraft designs, sparking unique creations such as the Transwing UAVs from Pterodynamics (courtesy of Pterodynamics)
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