Unmanned Systems Technology 016 | Hydromea Vertex AUV | Power management systems | Unmanned Space Vehicles | Continental CD-155 turbodiesel | Swift 020 UAV | ECUs | DSEI 2017 Show report

October/November 2017 | Unmanned Systems Technology 64 Digest | Swift 020 UAV been achieved, the two centre motors are switched off and the two wing-mounted motors provide propulsion for standard flight – although if needed, up to 83 kph is possible with all four motors powered. “Switching off the two centre motors is just how you achieve efficient flight. You switch off power systems you don’t need, and learn to rely on just the minimum to keep yourself aloft,” Streett says. For landing, the centre motors are turned back on, the vehicle pushes its front motors slightly harder than the others, and pitches upwards. After pitching up into a hover configuration, the UAV will typically have arrived a few hundred feet off its final landing point, allowing it to descend in the manner of a multirotor UAS. At its highest level, the UAV is fully autonomous, enabling the operator to pre-program their preferred landing waypoint. After landing, the motors are deactivated to allow personnel to approach and work on or collect the vehicle. Programming also allows the setting of an operator-timed mission, in which the 020 will take off once more after a certain time has passed. “There may be a lot of situations where you land in a predetermined area that you’re familiar with and have the airspace clear, where that full autonomy – what this vehicle has been designed for – is ideal. However, we’ve also designed it so that a human can jump into the loop,” Streett says. “Human-machine interaction/interfaces [HMI] is something we focus on heavily at Swift and we’ve been able to work on it with many organisations, having been contracted into understanding areas such as virtual reality and how to interact with machines in both anomalous and run-of- the-mill situations. “This is a practical concern for us because, more likely than not, when the 020 is coming in for a landing it will probably have to dodge a rock or tree stump you didn’t expect to be there, because it doesn’t show up on the original maps for example. “In that event, we’ve programmed in the ability to nudge the aircraft, similar to quadrotor systems where you press the control stick on the ground control station [GCS] for half-a-second and the vehicle translates that into five or six feet. “Typically we flip our gimbal to look down, or if you aren’t flying with the gimbal and you just have a small pinhole camera, the operator can actively provide a landing spot to the autopilot, whether they touch it on a screen or physically nudge the 020 into that location.” At the time of writing, the company was working on machine vision algorithms to aid this landing process. The landing control algorithm also allows operators to set the secondary ‘home point’. This is where the 020 initiates its inbound transition, either before or during the flight, typically about 100 ft away or wherever nearby that is not directly above a crowd or station. In order to navigate autonomously, sensor data from the 020’s IMU, pitot tube and RCD, thermal, current and voltage sensors are inputted into the autopilot system to generate control signals for the rotors and ailerons, while the onboard GNSS provides guidance. “We make our own circuit boards. Within that we have our own INS boards, and then we use a COTS GPS unit with the INS for position, velocity and orientation data,” says Streett. “The other sensors are also providing all the remaining necessary system- wide information for the aircraft to make informed autonomous decisions.” These same data sets are also outputted to the operator overviewing the mission from the GCS, should they determine a certain action necessary that conflicts with the 020’s chosen flight path. Development and testing In its current state, the 020 is the fourth iteration of the UAV created since the project began, and is Swift Engineering’s production-ready model. The prototype was centred on creating a low-cost proof-of-concept vehicle to trial such key variables as the autopilot, mission operations and fuselage dimensions, while the second and third models were iterations intended to demonstrate the vehicle’s capabilities in a commercial mission. The landing algorithm can be set to begin its inbound transition up to 100 ft away from the landing coordinates to avoid potential damage to people or assets