108 Digest | FIXAR 025 also to finalise our construction moulds,” Fainveits says. “We build our production units using a wet lay-out composite technology in aluminium moulds. It’s quite expensive to produce the moulds with the correct shape and size, and really expensive to get them wrong, so while the common instinct in aerospace engineering is to always go as big as possible, because ‘bigger is better’, we had to remember that usability – and hence transportability – were important to our customers.” To finalise the dimensions of the 025 and hence its construction moulds, FIXAR ran numbers to measure different UAV sizes and their associated revenues derived from expected mission-data gathering against the transport costs that could ensue for each aircraft size. “There’s standard crate and pallet sizes used in transportation. By judging against the cost of using and moving those, we arrived at our wingspan of 2.8 m. But it would still have been risky to dive right into cutting moulds for a 2.8 m-wingspan aircraft, so we made another scale prototype with a 1 m wingspan and built from plastic moulds,” Fainveits says. “By flight-testing that model, we saw several areas where the shape of the aircraft, and hence the moulds, needed to be adjusted. That’s been a running theme of our development, because we’re not dealing with traditional, 2D aerodynamics, where you have a wing with a top shell and bottom shell, and that’s all. We have a V-shaped nose, and a bunch of wings and angles all around that. “Doing that 1 m wingspan prototype as an intermediary r&d step was incredibly valuable to subsequently getting the full-scale 025 and its aluminium moulds right. We validated that we’d achieved that via 500 hours of flight testing before introducing it to the market in October 2024 – something we’d also done with the 007 before releasing it.” A point for every part Such were the importance of payload and mission efficiency to the engineering of the 025 that its developers designed it with multiple payload hard points to ease the work of fitting 10 kg worth of sensors and other mission devices onboard. “The nose and the bottom forwardmost part of the triangular box wing are two of the primary payload-mounting points, from which cameras can get unobstructed views of terrain and surroundings without any part of the airframe interfering with their visual line of sight [VLOS],” Fainveits says. “So, gimballed cameras, mapping cameras and multispectral cameras get installed at the nose, though gimballed cameras can also be installed behind the nose, and additional EO cameras can be installed inside the bottom corner of the box wing.” A Lidar sensor typically weighing 7 kg is installed as standard in the lower rear of the fuselage to provide a 3D terrainmapping and modelling function, and power the craft’s autonomous perception and obstacle avoidance (discussed below). Additional mapping cameras can be installed between the nose and Lidar in the central part of the fuselage undercarriage. The UAV thus carries multiple different payload sensors per flight, enabling mapping, surveillance, laser scanning and, potentially, deliveries to take place concurrently within individual operations. The 025’s batteries are mounted at the CoG, behind the nose. The autopilot, including the UAV’s two IMUs, sits very close by in the central part of the fuselage (to ensure the IMUs are as close to the CoG as possible for accurate inertial readings), placed directly under a top hatch for ease of access during maintenance. The motor controllers are installed in the lower left and lower right bottom February/March 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The 025 UAV’s software has been engineered to account for movements in the CoG stemming from multiple payloads being installed about its fuselage and wings
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