107 Japan and XER in Switzerland. The XER machine, for example, fills a niche for heavy-duty, long-endurance missions requiring BVLOS capabilities. “It can fly for 2.5 hours with heavy payloads, suiting clients who need more than a standard drone but less than a helicopter,” Gagne said. Volatus’ recent merger with Drone Delivery Canada adds cargo delivery to its solutions, enabling remote medical and goods transport. uAvionix presented products dedicated to airspace awareness, and the maintenance of command and control links through redundancy and diversity. Casia G is a ground detect-and-avoid (DAA) system for monitoring noncooperative and cooperative air traffic. With an optical view through 360°, it is designed to detect and track anything airborne approaching a UAV operating area, as Jason Hardy-Smith explained to us: “It streams high-resolution video to a processor that uses AI software to classify small planes, helicopters, drones, birds, etc, and give you their 3D position in real time. “It also has a dual-band Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) receiver built in.” The company also displayed muLTELinks, which receives command and control feeds through LTE cellular, industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band, C-band radio links. “Our muLTEink transmits and receives on all available links to give you path diversity,” Hardy-Smith said. “If you can’t get a signal from your C-band radio on the ground, then maybe you can see an LTE tower. Using multiple modalities also gives you frequency diversity. Lost links are no longer a problem.” Thirdly, uAvionix highlighted ping200XR TSO, a 100 g ADS-B receiver, configurable in real time through an app. The FAA technical service order (TSO) was granted in August. “With the ping200XR TSO, you can be compliant globally, and be seen by traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS), secondary surveillance radar (SSR) and ADS-B receivers,” added Hardy-Smith. Voliro exhibited Voliro T, a tilting propeller tricopter, designed to transform non-destructive testing (NDT) by enabling UAV-based contact inspections in industries such as oil and gas. As Shawn Gibbs explained to us at Voliro’s stand, Voliro T was designed for tasks requiring physical contact with structures, such as measuring wall thickness on tanks, pipes and flares. With its propeller guards and a contact probe, the UAV “touches the wall and tells you the material thickness”, which helps detect potential corrosion without the need for costly scaffolding. With a different contact probe, Voliro T can be used to measure the resistance of the lightning protection system in wind turbines. Voliro T’s ability to perform inspections in any orientation is key. “You can fly 90o up or 90o down,” Gibbs noted. Its unique configuration places two protected counter-rotating propellers on each end of a rotating shaft that passes through the vehicle’s fuselage, and a tail rotor that provides control in pitch. Recent upgrades include extended flight time – now up to 12 minutes with new battery technology – and more durable contact probes. Gibbs emphasises that Voliro’s subscription model offers full support and training, and the replacement of damaged equipment. Uncrewed Systems Technology | October/November 2024 Casia G AI-driven, electro-optical, situational awareness sensor
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