98 The Defence and Security Equipment International remains the biggest defence technology show in the world. As an illustration, more than 1500 defence and security suppliers exhibited at the 2023 iteration of this four-day event in September. As well as increasingly intelligent and capable uncrewed vehicles on display, cutting-edge subsystems for computation, navigation, connectivity, power, maintenance and more were unveiled. We met with ESG, a company that provides system integration services for aircraft, land vehicles and maritime systems to organisations across military and government services. “We’ve worked increasingly with uncrewed systems, particularly UAVs, although other uncrewed vehicles are being demanded at a faster rate,” explained Daniela Hildenbrand. “We consult with defence and government agencies to find the ideal vehicles for each of their use cases, including autonomous platforms of different sizes and capabilities, and we bring those systems into operation with their crews, mostly for ISR missions and especially reconnaissance. “As well as understanding the ins and outs of the uncrewed system and how its missions are carried out, we also have to work with the primes to make sure the demands – such as actionable intelligence – that the customer wants to derive from the uncrewed vehicle are being met by their operations.” ESG therefore researches and selects uncrewed vehicles, chooses and integrates payloads into them, and provides software for mission planning, monitoring and control, as well as postprocessing and analyses. Examples include the VorMUAS and AImEG projects in which ESG integrated a custom version of UMS Skeldar’s V-200 helicopter UAV to operate from the German Navy’s Suppliers of a wide range of systems and subsystems were gathered in London to show their wares to the defence industry, a selection of which Rory Jackson presents here Defence of the realms December/January 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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