28 Dossier | Schiebel Camcopter under engine failures very risky – and sometimes just 30 m above landmines (too risky for crewed helicopters to try). Key challenges along the way ran from figuring out how (in code writing) to first ensure the UAV could maintain a stable GNSS position and altitude before moving on to programming logical navigation from one waypoint to the next. Schiebel developed its own tools for calculating and simulating the aircraft’s dynamics as its 3.4 m-long prototype couldn’t be accurately modelled in the way that crewed helicopters (which were too big) and RC helicopters (too small) could. “But, from day one, Schiebel adapted the development standards of the crewed helicopter world as closely as it could, from design to engineering and testing,” Hunter adds. “That’s been a big reason why we’ve been able to get all our certifications and other regulatory approvals today – because authorities can see the attention to detail that’s gone into the Camcopter from its earliest days.” Nailing down these fundamental principles across numerous iterations was key to Schiebel finally unveiling its demonstration prototype, the Camcopter 5.1, to the public. It served a critical role in exploratory talks and trials for prospective customers to digest, and for Schiebel to find out how precisely they had hit upon what end-users needed. Such interactions in fact unearthed far higher performance targets than Hecht and his team realised were needed, if serious contracts and users were to be secured. “The 5.1 prototype could do maybe two hours of flight and had a MTOW of 60-72 kg, with a payload of around 10-15 kg. Its capabilities were state of the art for the time, and although we started by only flying over land, by 2000 we’d done our first flight trials with the US Coast Guard – the first shipboard operations using an uncrewed helicopter,” Hecht recounts. “That proved we could do automated take-off and landing on a moving ship, which was totally unprecedented – especially compared with fixed-wing UAVs, which still need things like launch catapults and net- or hook-capture infrastructure, or lift motors, which cost efficiency – and it kept the workload on the ‘pilot’ very low.” This had a significant impact on customer expectations. Upon seeing Schiebel’s UAV helicopter smoothly perform such computationally complex operations, they quickly realised that what they actually wanted was a minimum of six hours’ flight endurance while carrying a 25 cm camera, for three times the payload weight capacity of the 5.1, and, overall, a 200 km, real-time, long-range surveillance capability for each ship equipped with a Camcopter. With the goalposts moved far (but conclusively), a three-year development plan for the S-100 started in 2003, as a completely new and optimised design, with none of the hardware or software to carry over from the 5.1, although new and optimised algorithms for fully autonomous VTOL on faster moving and rolling ship decks were one obvious target. By the first customer trials in 2006, the first S-100 achieved many of the surface-level performance specifications still published today, including its minimum six-hour endurance (Hunter recounts that it set a new precedent for endurance that other, larger UAV helicopter OEMs August/September 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology A cooling radiator is installed atop the nose, which cools the engine sitting behind Extensive future-proofing means the flight computer hardware has been unchanged since 2006, although Schiebel is researching how best to add a computer for customer algorithms
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mzk4