106 the Ellipse on a boat, and also run specific flight tests on UAVs while analysing feedback from customer-led beta tests,” Benmakhlouf adds. CubePilot also attended the show and spoke with us about its Cube Red, which the company has designed specifically to be the dual-redundant offering among the company’s Cube family of flight-management units (FMUs). As Siddharth Purohit at CubePilot tells us: “The Cube Red FMU helps users easily manage uncrewed exploration vehicle operations as the module has two dual-core, double-precision FPU microprocessors for faster data processing than other systems.” The system design includes an Ethernet port for enabling expansion of networking capabilities. The module additionally features an external flash memory drive to accommodate larger and more complex programs than can be fitted into the FMU’s main memory. Naturally, the dual-redundant nature of Cube Red also lends the system to easier certifiability than non-redundant flight controllers; a key benefit for UAV designers and integrators engineering their aircraft for safety assurance and integrity levels. “And all the key components feature a redundancy system to ensure uninterrupted vehicle operation, regardless of a fault occurring in one of them,” Purohit adds. Hargrave Technologies launched its new nanoDRIVE 4LPi on the first morning of the event. It is an ESC that has been designed principally for the speed and agility requirements of FPV quadrotor UAVs with around 5-10 in (12.7-25.4 cm) diameter propellers. “It supports all the standard protocols, like PWM and DShot, but we’ve designed it to work using DroneCAN first and foremost, especially for scalability,” says Hargrave’s Saami Bashar. “Users could install nanoDRIVE 4LPi on thousands of UAVs and still configure them, update them, and plug and play with them smoothly. That’s what DroneCAN allows.” The motor controller has been designed with a very small form factor, weighing just 20 g, which posed significant thermal management challenges during development, given the minimal surface area for heat dissipation relative to the ESC’s four 20 A channels and up to 34 V system operating voltage. As Bashar explains: “One novel part of solving that has been putting the capacitors atop the board, which most manufacturers don’t do because of the extra processing steps it entails. Adding capacitors this way reduces ripple current and therefore heat generation, and also gives us a fairly open design, such that we can use the board itself as a spreader and dissipater of heat. It also hugely helps the system cool down when it is inside an aircraft hull without direct exposure to any air rush.” The nanoDRIVE 4LPi runs using Hargrave’s new, proprietary FOCAL motor-control algorithm, which the Australian company engineered to be more efficient than the conventional FOC in real-world applications, after discovering that FOC was often more effective in lab conditions than in actual operations. “FOCAL behaves adaptively, because when you change environments with a UAV, you deviate somewhat from the optimal conditions that the motor and motor controller are tuned together for working in. After about three years of r&d, we have an algorithm that adapts on the fly instead,” Bashar explains. Notably, Hargrave did not use or train AI to write the adaptive FOCAL algorithm. While AI is highly valuable in applications such as perception-based object classification with 90-98% confidence, anything less than 100% reliability is dangerous for flight-critical components such as motor controllers. “We estimate FOCAL gives 3-5% power-efficiency gains over FOC in the average mission profile, which could be huge for a company using UAVs regularly every month,” Bashar adds. SightLine Applications has launched its new 1710 dual-channel processor module, which comes with two MIPI channels for integrating a pair of MIPI cameras into a single unit, generating two processed video streams at once. “It is similar to our 1750, which we released a couple of years ago, and runs on the same NXP multi-core processor, but we’ve redesigned it for a smaller form factor to fit into smaller gimbals,” says Hanni Wehrman from SightLine. “The biggest contributor to that redesign and rightsizing has been the dual MIPI approach. Instead of having a bunch of different connectors and interfaces as a catch-all approach, the 1710 just has MIPI connectors. “This redesign will particularly appeal to customers who previously used the 1500 module, which reached end-of-life after its processor manufacturer discontinued production. The 1500 was the smallest processor in SightLine’s lineup, and with its discontinuation, the company developed the 1710 as a more powerful replacement, capable of supporting the full suite of SightLine functionality.” The company has finalised a number of new software capabilities, including an AI detection feature that tracks objects and determines (with a given confidence index) what each object is, including people, UAVs and vehicles. Additionally, a new precision acquisition April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Hargrave Technologies’ nanoDRIVE 4LPi motor controller
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