26 Dossier | Schiebel Camcopter Around 40 minutes south of the Vienna head office, one finds the Schiebel factory in Wiener-Neustadt, built upon an airport where other aerospace entities such as Diamond Aircraft can trial new designs and components. Built in 2006, the factory was expanded during the COVID-19 lockdown to double its capacity, with the company estimating that it would be able to construct more than 10 UAVs per month with great ease. Actual production figures are dictated by a combination of contract sales and, to a lesser extent, r&d. A few units are always kept in stock for short-notice customers, as Schiebel persistently targets a delivery time of six months or less from the point of a new contract being signed. “Every customer wants a slightly different configuration; hence we build per contract instead of churning out a fixed stock of units each year,” Hunter explains. “It’s also why our CTO, Johannes Hecht, has spent the last several decades optimising the S-100 to be an open and modular solution, built around a very specific and optimised set of subsystems.” From mine to UAS Founded in the 1950s, Schiebel gained prominence in the 1980s as a maker of handheld mine-detection or mine countermeasure (MCM) equipment. Soon after, owner Hans Georg Schiebel pondered whether mines could be detected from an uncrewed helicopter. As Hecht recounts: “It was around 1992 that he saw people doing aerial photography from model aircraft and, in 1993, Schiebel started a programme aimed at installing computers with intelligent mine-detection software on RC helicopters. “Of course, back then, PC hardware the size of a shoebox had less than a fraction of the computing power of a smartphone today, and RC helicopters hadn’t the aerodynamics or engines to fly more than 300 m. But the resulting model vehicles were still enough for us to start flying and creating our first software models.” The next three years of r&d saw Schiebel experiment with greater quantities of computing power and software, which meant upgrading to larger RC models, going from 1.5 m-long helicopters in 1993 to 3 m-long products in 1996, with engine power rising from about 2 hp to 10 hp. “We also started learning how to better stabilise the helicopter via the control algorithms and software models,” Hecht continues. “Helicopters are unlike most fixed-wing aircraft in that they are inherently unstable – they always ‘want’ to crash – but step by step we wrote, installed and validated our first control loops. “Those all came from completely blank sheets as there was no open-source world back then, and the few big companies who had helicopter UAV control algorithms, like Airbus and Boeing, guarded them as top secret, the absolute highest trade secrets. “Post-1996, with three years of feasibility studies and development under our belts, we made a clear decision to formally design an original, stable, autonomous prototype to demonstrate aerial minefield detection for a customer.” The Camcopter 5.1 That demonstration came in 1999, and included the prototype autonomously flying via GNSS waypoints while operating a mine-sensing camera; even flying in the ‘dead man’s curve’ – height and airspeed combinations defined in helicopter manuals as making safe landings August/September 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The S-100’s first customer trials came in 2006. The UAE became its launch customer shortly after, and today its newest clients include emissions-monitoring organisations
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