59 decades, despite widespread stability and technological advancements, and the availability of surveyors has dwindled sharply recently, HP anticipates HP SitePrint to garner significant interest. The HP SitePrint Robot operates with a Li-ion battery, enabling up to four hours of continuous operation (which can be quickly swapped for a fully charged battery to minimise downtime), as well as a 400 ml printer ink cartridge. It weighs 9 kg, measures 52.5 x 31.7 x 26.1 cm, and can move at speeds up to 2.52 kph, while printing up to 1.26 km of lines per hour. TM IT-Systemhaus attended the expo to showcase its BeastTX GCS, for the growing industrial segment of geospatial specialists flying UAVs for their wide-area surveys, mappings and inspections. The rectangular, handheld controller is CNC-machined from aluminium and weighs 1.5 kg. It sports a central, 7 in screen, multiple antenna ports, and dual sets of joysticks, buttons and flippers (for both left- and right-thumb interfacing), as well as rotary dials and a battery enabling up to six hours of operation. “The inventor of this product owns a fleet of agricultural survey UAVs, and was always quite frustrated that he had to carry around his own ‘GCS’ consisting of a laptop, ground antennas and many additional devices,” said Torsten Appelhagen. “That complex arrangement merited a full car of equipment for every mapping job, so the general design for the BeastTX started more than 10 years ago, to create a GCS suited for our own purposes with all that equipment integrated into one lightweight device.” Up to four data links can be integrated in the BeastTX, with any type that is compatible, including cabled connections to external radio systems if a must-have solution is too big for the housing of the handheld GCS. Inside the GCS is a PCB, engineered to TM IT-Systemhaus’ own design, with a 500 GB SSD as standard (although up to 2 TB of space can be integrated) and a chipset chosen to accommodate the company’s embedded software requirements (and to avoid simply building around a third-party tablet). “For now, we have an Intel x6425e quad-core CPU with up to 3 GHz processing speed, but soon we are switching to an even more modern Intel Atom CPU, which will give a great load of compute power for edge-processing real-world data in real time,” Appelhagen said. “That will mean end-users running UAS operations with the BeastTX won’t have to wait to get back to their offices to start making actionable information from their camera, Lidar or other data.” MostaTech has made a number of updates to its FOG IMU products, the first being some size reductions to the Maltese firm’s already SWaP-optimised systems and new advancements in its approach to magnetic shielding. “Our U123D and U123DM FOG IMU products used to be 100 mm long. Now they’re only 90 mm long,” said Arthur Tua. “Also, we’ve redesigned the product’s architecture from an external shielding to internal shielding, which makes for a lighter system as the external shield was quite heavy. It also makes the system easier to manufacture in terms of assembly being less cumbersome.” In general, internal shielding features have much smaller, less problematic openings than external shields. In the U123 IMUs, each gyro is now individually magnetically shielded, with an aluminium housing encapsulating the product at system level. Additionally, for clients with extreme shielding needs (such as those installing inertial systems close to large electric motors or other systems outputting high levels of EM radiation), the U123 IMUs can be supplied with both the internal and external shielding components, trading lightness for operational robustness. FlyXdrive, a spin-out from the Institute of Flight System Dynamics of Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen University, exhibited to showcase the TW-Neo, its tilt-wing UAV that has successfully conducted demonstration flights for applications such as airborne medical logistics in various countries. “The company was founded in 2017, principally for the manufacturing of its tilting-wing drone, the technology of which enables its VTOL flight system, and hence versatility in different services, among which are photographic and video survey for agricultural and other geospatial markets,” said Eva König. The TW-Neo UAV has a MTOW of 8 kg and a payload capacity of up to 2 kg. The aircraft is battery-electric and typically flies at airspeeds of 100-120 kph, with an average flight endurance of one hour. To date, the craft’s (and company’s) most significant operation was a research project jointly conducted with the Institute of Flight System Dynamics, aimed at using the UAV to improve Intergeo | Show report Uncrewed Systems Technology | December/January 2025 The HP SitePrint UGV has been developed for line-printing floor layouts on construction sites MostaTech's U123D & U123DM have been size-optimised, from 100 mm long down to 90 mm
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