The Paris Air Show, marking its 100th anniversary this week, opened today. The mood among the world’s aviation industry leaders was as damp as the weather, says the AP. But the atmosphere was decidedly bright around Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (wiki list).
Pulling out all the stops for Paris were U.S. military contractors like Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.
Boeing today announced a new unmanned aerial vehicle division that will consolidate its unmanned system activities under a single unit headquartered in Seattle. The UAS division will assume program management responsibility for the A160T Hummingbird, Unmanned Little Bird and SolarEagle (Vulture) programs.
Aurora Flight Sciences has a Vulture design (above) is actually three air vehicles that take off separately and dock in the stratosphere.
Insitu, a wholly owned Boeing subsidiary, manufactures the ScanEagle and Integrator unmanned aerial systems. Integrator has line of sight communications range of over 55 nautical miles with extended beyond line of sight mission radius of up to 550nm.
Boeing expects the global unmanned market to be worth $60 billion to $100 billion over the next 10 years. Boeing’s annual revenue from unmanned business is now around $400 million.
Boeing’s unmanned systems is also doing development work on the High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) program, and recently announced that is it developing the Phantom Ray UAV. The first flight of a Phantom Ray prototype is expected late this year or early in 2010.
Raytheon has its KillerBee while Lockheed has their Global Hawk high altitude plane.
Schiebel’s Camcopter S-100 will fly at the show, with large screens showing real-time high-resolution daylight and infrared video from the gimbaled camera system.
Meanwhile, Thales and EADS are battling for UAV dominance in Europe. The European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) is showing their Advanced UAV medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) air vehicle, complete with 28-meter wingspan. France, Germany and Spain jointly funded the report to the tune of 60 million euros.
Thales executives say the Advanced UAV is too costly. Thales operates the HermesHermes 450 on a lease to the British Army in Afghanistan under the Watchkeeper program. Britain and Italy run national UAV programs including the Mantis, Sky X and Sky Y.
UAVs will likely play an increased role in search and rescue in the United States as well as border control. Cities may come next.
Tier I and Tier II UAVs almost never use satellite links (pdf) because they can’t support the size and weight of high-gain tracking antennas, but Tier II UAVs (medium altitude, long endurance) like the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper, use L- or C-band links as well as S-band (pdf). Newer satellite platforms could bring broadband connectivity to small UAVs.
DARPA is expected to sign a “Vulture” contract shortly, building an UAV with an endurance of 5 years. Lockheed’s UAV is solar-powered, like the Aurora and Boeing concepts selected for study under Darpa’s Vulture program.
Getting access to U.S. airspace for UAVs would be necessary to grow the domestic market. Monster satellites like ViaSat, Terrastar or ICO could deliver broadband backbones to tiny aircraft. Perhaps Lockheed and Boeing will buy a piece of those satellite networks and become “digital divide” advocates. WiMAX cities like Seattle and Chicago could also be targets of opportunity, in collaboration with the corporation’s Russian partners.
The handheld Harris RF-7800T receiver, is a portable ground-based Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver (ROVER) for video captured by UAVs. Harris says it is the first video receiver packaged in a standard military-hardened handheld form factor. The handheld ISR Receiver operates in the L-frequency band (1.71 GHz to 1.81 GHz), and also supports both S-Band (2.2 GHz to 2.5 GHz) and C-Band (4.4 GHz to 5.8 GHz). The initial release provides NTSC FM video formatted data.
Raytheon announced it will use speech technologies provider Loquendo to integrate their Voice Security Library (LVSL) into the company’s Redwolf Collection System. Raytheon’s Redwolf provides government intelligence agencies with a one-stop solution that collects, stores and analyzes digital audio telecommunications, Internet traffic and VoIP communications.
The Loquendo Voice Security Library filters data and identifies voices, languages and the gender of the speaker so that intelligence agencies no longer need to take a number of recordings to uncover data. Loquendo Automatic Speaker Verification interfaces with any kind of DB architecture.
Redwolf supports post-processing operations such as call data analysis, call content playback, call mapping, geo location, link analysis, and pen register database functions which turn information into actionable intelligence.
Related Dailywireless articles include; Tracking Antenna from BAT, Border Surveillance, UAVs On Parade, Backyard Helicopter Security, Swarming UAVs, Remote Ocean Viewer, Mountain Rescue UAVs, E911 & Triangulation, Volcano Sensor Net, California Wildfires Networked, HDTV from Aircraft, Wireless Recon Airplanes, On Mt. Saint Helens and Earthquake Monitoring.
