103 IMU from TDK Invensense with a ±32 g acceleration range and that company’s BalancedGyro technology. Both the Pixhawk 6X and 6X Pro follow the Pixhawk Autopilot Bus (PAB) open standards. “By following the PAB Standard, its connector allows it to plug into various carrier boards or baseboards, whether manufactured by us or by others,” said Vince Poon. “Then, our Pixhawk Jetson Baseboard integrates the Pixhawk and Nvidia Jetson Orin NX, all on one board; on the bottom are two M.2 Keys for Bluetooth, wi-fi, and SSD interfacing,” Poon continued. “This baseboard is also built around the PAB standard, so theoretically, any flight controller unit that follows PAB can be swapped into it in place of the 6X Pro. The two systems are connected via CAN, UART, and Ethernet switch, and we’ve optimised it for developers who want to program an autopilot with AI functions like image recognition in a small form factor.” Holybro also displayed its range of GNSS solutions, including its Mosaic-H dual-antenna RTK-GNSS. “When you rely on a magnetometer for heading, there’s a high chance of interference from, say, power lines or metallic structures; dual antenna GNSS heading doesn’t have that type of weakness,” Poon added. “It also has embedded anti-jamming and antispoofing capabilities programmed into the chip it’s built around.” Fuel Safe Systems has developed a new material for making fuel tanks that are bulletproof (in a sense): this coating technology creates tank walls that selfseal following piercing ballistic strikes. “When the self-sealing coating takes a wound, it has a two-stage reaction,” Trevor Hart explained to us. “The first is an elastic reaction, in which molecularly the material wants to rebound back to where it was before the strike, and the second is a chemical reaction triggered by exposure to the fuel. “The material is extremely incompatible with fuel, so it reacts by swelling up, and that closes the wound very rapidly after fuel passes through, after which the exposure is minimised and the swelling stops.” As well as optimising the reaction time and rate of swelling, Fuel Safe Systems has also worked closely on reducing the weight of the coating, to ensure the fuelsaving gained for users in environments with firing risks is not significantly offset by reduced flight time. That involved roughly one-and-half years of testing and changing materials, including formulating a proprietary chemical structure. “The coating is available today, and we’ll customise tanks for the different calibre rounds that UAV operators might need to protect against - obviously, the smaller the calibre, the lighter the system can be because the coating doesn’t have to be as thick ,” Hart noted. Cobra AERO has unveiled a new form of ignition that it anticipates will make its two-stroke engines considerably more efficient. “The technology is a turbulent jet ignition process, which is trademarked in our configuration as JetFire, though it’s something used across Formula One at the moment,” explained Sean Hilbert. “Every Formula One car is powered by a preXponential 2024 | Show report Uncrewed Systems Technology | June/July 2024 Holybro’s Pixhawk 6X Pro flight controller features an STM32 H753 processor, a triple redunant IMU, and a proprietary vibration isolation system Fuel Safe Systems’ fuel tanks can now come with a coating that self-seals following ballistics penetration
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