52 Digest | RigiTech Eiger UAV with space left over. When it comes to logistics, having 5 kg of payload capacity in a tiny area is not as good as 3 kg in a spacious area.” While constraining around volume, RigiTech prioritised three targets. First (in no specific order), performance was key to ensuring a good cruising speed and range, such that within one hour of flight endurance, the UAV could fly its 3 kg payload out to 50 km and return along the same distance safely. “We did a decent amount of aerodynamic studies and optimisations for weight, CoG and so on, so that the aircraft would fly well,” Klaptocz says. “It’s not the fastest or longest-endurance UAV out there, but people understand this solution works well and gets emergency packages to where they need to go, with a good but still safe speed.” Second, safety was a vital consideration, particularly since Eiger flies BVLOS. To comply with the relevant standards, the aircraft’s subsystems include multiple means of detecting other aircraft and the aforementioned backup, parachute and FTS hardware to prove extra layers of safety to regulators. “Fundamentally, our aircraft is big. It is almost 3 m wide and weighs 22 kg. If this UAV falls from the sky, you’re not just losing a med pack, you’re dropping 22 kg from the air and possibly sending it at around 100 kph,” Klaptocz notes. “So, even if the regulations didn’t exist, we just do not want this aircraft falling from the air, so redundancy and safety are built-in to ensure escalating levels of reaction to different scales of failures, so even if it starts falling it does so in a safe and controlled way. If the airspeed sensor gets blocked, the computer system realises, compensates with GNSS inertial data and keeps flying steadily. “If a wing breaks, which hasn’t happened yet, it switches to multicopter mode, and algorithms detect for a safe landing spot to guide it down.” The third target was automation. As part of the many-to-many solution, both Eiger and RigiCloud integrate significant automatic behaviour, such that flights and deliveries do not break down due to one of the many persons involved across the stages of a given delivery failing to manually check a given box. The GCS interface is also designed to contain huge amounts of pertinent information, but also to ensure that what each person initially views in their main display panel is as simple as possible. Discussion of these behaviours and information are presented later in this feature. Eyes on Eiger The Eiger UAV is fully-electric and designed as a fixed-wing aircraft with a pusher propeller and quadrotor VTOL motors mounted on twin booms. This has been chosen as a practical and conventional airframe configuration, which would minimise the number of onboard moving parts to effectively just four servos (two wing ailerons and two ruddervators across the outboard vee-tail) for both safety and reliability. The lion’s share of safety-critical subsystems sits at the back, where they are most protected in the highly unlikely event of a CFIT. Going from the pusher propellor forwards, one immediately finds a parachute concealed under a cap, and then a backup computer, which triggers the parachute’s rapid pyrotechnic deployment in emergency situations (RigiTech having determined that a spring-launched parachute would not grant a satisfactory speed of unfurling and descent slowdown). “The backup computer provides further redundant control functions for safe emergency landings, and has its own backup battery as a short-run power source for itself and other subsystems, in case even the main battery should fail,” Klaptocz says. The back of the UAV contains a secondary GNSS radio, and most importantly the autopilot computer, a downward-facing Lidar for autonomous precision landing and a flight termination system (FTS), which cuts power to the motors as a last-resort safety measure (FTSs are expected by many to become a requirement for certification in the near future, although the exact nature of their termination function may depend on the flight area and application). Underneath the central payload bay are boards and cable management for the Eiger’s power distribution, as well as the aforementioned main battery. That is a 48 V, 1 kWh, 22,000 mAh April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology A parachute is installed at the rear, along with a backup battery and computer to ensure it deploys, even if all other subsystems fail
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