Schiebel Camcopter | Dossier in-house before being delivered to the third-party manufacturer. Once the carbon is laid up on the moulds, sufficient parts for a single S-100 can all fit within a single autoclave, and if necessary the cured parts can then be machined to exact tolerances in-house. After being checked and validated for quality control, the parts are painted by an external company (they and the mould supplier are subject to change, so Schiebel declines to name them) and then assembled in the final UAV product. Data links The UAV and its payload sensors are the primary shading obstacle for direct, continuous C2 with the GCS. To circumvent this, Schiebel typically installs an omnidirectional antenna at the aft-most point of the hull, which provides 270° of comms coverage centred about the rear, and a +120° sector antenna at the nose coverings for the remaining 90°. “For redundancy, a second data link is installed, which always works at a lower frequency than the primary set, varying as these do with customers’ band requirements, and an omnidirectional antenna at the underbelly provides the uplink and downlink for that second radio,” Hecht adds. “There will sometimes be a tiny bit of shading from the main payload gimbal, but never enough that there are any significant consequences.” Although COTS antennas were used during the prototypes leading up to the Camcopter 5.1, those used in the S-100’s primary and secondary C2 links are heavily customised for optimal opening angles (the area within which the majority of the radiated power is available), mounting, vibration tolerance and a variety of performance parameters. Additional data links are typically integrated based on customer requests, covering various types of video feeds, comms relays, transponders and encryption solutions, which Schiebel approaches much as it would mission payload systems. The result is normally about four different data links per UAV to ensure all sensor information is transmitted smoothly and uncorrupted to the ground, and Schiebel aims to use COTS antennas for the ancillary data links (and also for GNSS signals) as far as possible. “Much of the customisation in our data links in the past had to do with saving weight, as back then we even had to use bulky Mode S transponders originally designed for crewed aircraft, but it is much easier today to find radios for UAVs that are really small, lightweight and powerefficient, and using Sagetech’s MXS and MX12B transponders have similarly helped save our SWaP budgets,” Hecht notes. “Overall, I’d say avionics’ SWaP parameters have gone down by a factor of two to three over the last five years. It’s the same on the payload side: performances have gone up while sizes have gone down, and though we originally had to make our own gimbals because no-one made one suitable for our size requirements, Schiebel has been able to shut down its in-house gimbal production and focus on more important areas because of thirdparty suppliers of high-quality gimbals multiplying.” Control interfaces While Schiebel has designed its own control station software in tandem with the development of the S-100, its open architecture and interface control document enable straightforward integration with any third-party software suitably configured for communicating with and commanding the UAV. “We aim to open the architecture more in the future to allow more types of third-party commands, including UTM software, swarm management systems or STANAG-compliant interfaces, for instance,” Hecht adds. “From early on, we realised an open architecture was going to be important, but the Camcopter also has very specific capabilities; for instance, when flying under severe environmental conditions close to a ship, or flying with the control station out of a moving truck, or performing very special flight patterns in combination with automated payload controls. Other UI software won’t always have integrated keybindings, control mappings or any other kind of inputs for those.” “So it will almost always come down to a combination of Camcopter-specific ‘plugins’ – if you want to call them that – with the standard software of a 37 Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2024 Schiebel’s open architecture and interface control document enable straightforward integration with any third-party systems suitable for C2 over the S-100
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