Schiebel Camcopter | Dossier comms relay system. In that operation, a maritime patrol aircraft will drop a vast number of sonobuoys, while the S-100 aerially relays data between them and to a mothership. Lastly, Schiebel is in talks with an unnamed American company (via the US Navy) whose prototype sensor may be able to penetrate deeply below the waves for submarine hunting. “And while transponders aren’t payloads, we will install anything from Modes 1-to-5 and up to Mode S, based on customer requests, and we’ve moved into ADS-B wherever possible, because right now that’s the only real way to give yourself some conspicuity to crewed traffic or ATC. There is still no real, standardised detectand-avoid system for UAVs to comply with, as much as we expect it to come with time,” Hunter says. The copter’s computers The autopilot has been engineered in-house using raw materials, with INSs and GNSSs (from NovAtel) supplied externally. The air data systems and computer architectures for the flight computer (as well as the ECU and BMS) have been developed internally. The flight hardware has remained largely unchanged since 2006, having been heavily future-proofed from early on to account for anticipated airworthiness requirements over the subsequent 20 years, with flight software updates being central to capability improvements in redundancy, safety, efficiency and payload compatibility since then. “If you provide a certifiable flight computer to the customer, the hardware can no longer be changed, aside from very minor obsolescences,” Hecht says. “We essentially have three PowerPCs onboard, but in Version 1 of the flight software, two of the three PowerPCs were idle during flight, and just one did all the work. “All the flight control, payload management, power management, data link management, video processing are all handled in the processing power of a single PowerPC. And the other two weren’t redundant systems; they couldn’t be made to function like backups yet. “But, over the years, we expanded the software capabilities, raised the autonomy capabilities, activated the second PowerPC to take over some duties and serve as a redundant flight controller, and activated the third to take on all the payload management, leading to a A rigid rotor design is used for the main rotor head, chosen and engineered for stability and robustness against movements in the CoG Not a pilot project. Volz Servos – provider of trusted, reliable and certifiable parts for your AAM. VOLZ Servos Reliability for progress volz-servos.com DA 15-N-HT SEE YOU? SEE YOU! SEPT 24-25 / LONDON BOOTH #H62
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