28 with effectively a sliding scale between the flight logic of a hovering UAV and that of a fixed-wing UAV. This aircraft has also been tapped for use by naval vessels, particularly in ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore logistics, and such is the importance of lifting heavy loads in this application that since our feature on Pterodynamics (issue 41, December 2021/January 2022) the company has announced plans for two larger variations of its flagship, the allelectric 38 kg MTOW X-P4. The variants are the upcoming hybridelectric X-P5, which will weigh 150 kg when fully loaded and carry 22.67 kg payloads, and the X-P6, which will be powered by a turbo-generator, have a 600 kg MTOW, and lift up to 100 kg of payload per flight. It will also be the fastest aircraft the company builds, with an estimated 120 knots compared to the 100 knots typical of the X-P4 and expected of the X-P5, as well as having an 850 nautical mile range when fully loaded. All of that is not to say VTOL-transitioning UAVs are a one-size-fits-all solution. Landing verticallywith a set of wingsmakes themmore prone to being blown off-course by gusts thanmulti-rotors, and the added moving parts – be they tiltrotors or fixed-lift motors –will inevitably look like littlemore than additional points of failure to riskaverse technicians. Multi-rotor, STOL and catapult-launched UAVs are therefore still widely used in a range of military, commercial and other applications, and their operations have undoubtedly grown. But no other corner of the aviation world features VTOLtransitioning anywhere near as much as uncrewed systems do, marking this group of technologies as one of themost prominent features that historians of this industry will probably point to. AI on land and sea The first forays by this publication intoUGVs were tentative. Initially, we investigated only exploratory projects in uncrewedmining and farming, aswell as the occasional autonomous pod taxi or self-driving test and research vehicle, suchwas the less mature nature of UGV technology from 2014 to 2016 relative toUAVs. The past few years however have seen an enormous surge in the number of successful UGV OEMs, especially in logistics. Companies such as Einride and Starship Technologies (both featured in issue 37, April/May 2021) received global mainstreammedia attention for their vehicles – the former being a 26 t road freight hauler, the latter a 20 kg robot for kerbside food deliveries. Despite the complexity and potential dangers of trusting an autonomous system to deliver goods amid people or road vehicles, a lot of companies are now developing very different solutions for handling freight and throughput, while navigating different kinds of traffic. The Clevon 1 for instance (issue 47, December 2022/January 2023) is a 470 kg last-mile delivery vehicle being used by DHL and others for transporting loads of 150 kg at a time by road, whereas Kodiak’s Gen4 (issue 48, February/March 2023) is an 18-wheeler capable of moving shipping containers autonomously across America’s highways, and Ottonomy’s Ottobot (issue 49, April/May 2023) is designed to deliver food or groceries through streets or airport terminals (GNSS being unsuitable in both cases). Part of this success has come from tandem advances in hardware and software for navigation solutions beyond pure reliance on GNSS. By being almost always closer to the ground than UAVs, UGVs must typically travel through urban canyons and hence need more than GNSS to reach their objectives and recovery points without issue. The availability of visual SLAMhas been widened greatly by the proliferation of online libraries and open-source algorithms for training UGVs’ main computers to detect and classify key objects in the context of the environments through which they have to navigate, such as pedestrians, charging points or other vehicles. At the same time, the advent of computer platforms designed specifically with vehicular AI inmind has enabled widespread access to the levels of CPU, GPU and FPGA hardware necessary for such intelligence, and for complex decision-making to be performed at speeds necessary for obstacle avoidance or safe braking at speed. Both of these have also been assisted by the greater supply and capabilities of 3D Lidar across the industry. The Ottobot for instance primarily uses 3D Lidar for geometric details on surrounding objects, as well as cameras June/July 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology UGVs have become increasingly safe and successful when operating on roads, thanks to great improvements in AI unlocking higher levels of self-driving intelligence (Courtesy of Einride)
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