12 Platform one Researchers at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Linz have developed a lightweight solar cell that is suitable for UAVs, writes Nick Flaherty. The solar cells have a power output of up to 44 W/g and a comparatively high level of stability, despite using perovskite materials, which can have a limited lifetime. The group of researchers – from the Department of Soft Matter Physics and the LIT Soft Material Lab at JKU, and the Linz Institute for Organic Solar Cell – developed a flexible solar cell that is 2.5 um thick, but still has a conversion efficiency of 20.1 % with an open-circuit Teledyne FLIR has developed a video processor for AI algorithms to use in its thermal cameras, writes Nick Flaherty. The FLIR AVP video processor weighs 5 g and is based around the QCS8550 mobile processor from Qualcomm, which has been optimised for UAV and robot sensors. It runs the Teledyne FLIR Prism AI and image signal pipeline (ISP) software libraries, and interfaces with the company’s Boson and Neutrino thermal infrared imaging camera modules, as well as a wide range of popular visible cameras. The FLIR Prism AI model has been trained on the world’s largest thermal image data lake of more than five million annotations to detect, classify and track targets or objects for automotive autonomy, automotive automatic emergency braking, airborne camera payloads and counter-UAV systems. Prism ISP is a set of image-processing algorithms that include super resolution, image fusion, atmospheric turbulence removal, electronic stabilisation, local-contrast enhancement and noise reduction for the cameras. methylbenzyl ammonium iodide as the photoactive perovskite layer, placed directly onto an ultra-thin polymer foil coated with a transparent aluminium oxide layer, to ensure environmental and mechanical stability without compromising on weight or flexibility. (see data storage feature, page 42). An Adreno 740 GPU and Hexagon Tensor Processor (HTP) with Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX) and Hexagon Matrix eXtensions (HMX) are used to process the 8 bit and 16 bit AI data. The chip includes concurrent GPS, Glonass, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, NavIC and sensor-assisted Positioning, and it supports up to six cameras. Several tools support the AVP board to simplify and streamline development, including a Qualcomm RB5 robotic development kit. Software and board-support packages are also available. Solar cells Video processing Lightweight perovskite solar cells meet stability challenge AI processing board for UAV thermal cameras voltage of 1.15 V. The researchers fitted a palm-sized, commercial Solar Hopper quadcopter UAV with 24 x 1 cm2 cells in the frame, making up just 1/400 of its total weight. The configuration enabled the UAV to operate self-sufficiently and perform consecutive charge-flight-charge cycles without wired recharging. For reliable, stable and flexible solar cells with a high power-to-weight ratio, there needs to be a balance between low gas and moisture permeability, high flexibility and transparent plastic substrates plus sturdy photovoltaic materials. The cells are built with alphaThe QCS8550 processor is built on a leading-edge, 4 nm process technology and measures 15.6 x 14.0 mm. It is mounted on the AVP System-on-Module (SoM) board, measuring 40.27 x 33.41 mm. The processor has eight 64-bit CPU cores and the latest AI accelerator cores. The main ARM Cortex-X3 core runs at up to 3.36 GHz, and it is supported by four performance cores running up to 2.8 GHz and three efficiency cores at up to 2 GHz. AI models can take a lot of memory, and the chip supports up to 16 Gbytes of low-power LP DDR5 memory and 256 GB of storage using the UFS3.1 standard June/July 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology A lightweight UAV powered by perovskite solar cells (Image courtesy of JKU) The AVP video-processing board (Image courtesy of Teledyne FLIR)
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