U.S. Navy engineers are testing a smart winch that will allow tethered unmanned aerial vehicles to launch and land on an autonomous, uncrewed boat.
Tethered UAVs, most are a kind of quadcopter, transmit communications and power through the tether, allowing them to operate for longer periods relative to a battery-powered drone.
Most tethered UAVs use the taut-tether style, which maintains tension on the tether strung between the base station and the UAV. But the taut-tether style doesn’t work for the Navy because the frequent pitching and rolling motion of ships in in choppy waters would break the line.
A small UAV hovers in a wind tunnel at NSWC Carderock while the Navy’s newly patented smart winch controls the UAV’s tether Sept. 6–9, 2022 (Jared Soltis/Navy)
That’s why Kurt Talke, a mechanical engineer at the Naval Information Warfare Center in San Diego, designed a new tether system that keeps slack in the tether using a smart winch that unwinds the spool such that the UAV can hover at a specific altitude while the ship below crashes through waves. The winch autonomously performs the paying out and taking in of the tether with the spool motor by measuring the tether-departure angle.
In November, the Navy reported that Talke had partnered with Jared Soltis and Eric Silberg, aerospace engineers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center-Carderock Division, to test the tether system in a wind tunnel and earlier in an indoor wave pool known as the MASK Basin.
Navy engineers pilot a small UAV in a wind tunnel test in September 2022. The test was part of an ongoing R&D of a smart winch and slack-line tether system. (Jared Soltis/Navy)
The experiments will eventually support the Naval Sea Systems Command Unmanned Maritime Systems (PMS 406) Program Office, which is overseeing the development of the Navy’s unmanned surface vehicle fleet, which now includes the Seahawk, a 145-ton vessel with 14,000 gallons of fuel that can patrol the ocean for months without a crew member aboard.
Adding a tethered quadcopter to the Seahawk may allow the Navy to elevate cameras to heights that expand the line of sight or conduct offboard mine detection operations.
On September 13, 2022, the Navy was granted U.S. Patent 11,440,680 for Talke’s work developing the smart winch.
Through the Navy’s technology transfer program, private companies can apply for a patent license, which would allow the smart winch to be commercialized.
TechLink, the Navy’s national tech transfer intermediary, is providing no-cost support to license applicants. Companies are invited to contact TechLink now to start the process.
Source: Tech Link