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Rockwell Collins’ Athena family of flight control and navigation systems exceeded 1 million flight hours on several UAS performing surveillance operations primarily in the Middle East. This fact emerged out of the company’s quarterly report, which also announced a sales increase of $81 million, or 7%, to $1.223 billion for its second quarter ended March 31, 2011 compared to sales of $1.142 billion for the same period a year ago.
Source: American Chronicle
Northrop Grumman Corporation has announced the start of system tests of a new Multi-Function Active Sensor (MFAS) being developed here for use by the U.S. Navy onboard the MQ-4C Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Unmanned Aircraft System (BAMS UAS).
The Navy programme office in charge of the service’s newest unmanned aerial system is looking to integrate Air Force-centric hardware into that aircraft, as a way to close a critical collection gap in ongoing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations.
Lockheed Martin ’s Tactical Reconnaissance and Counter-Concealment-Enabled Radar, TRACER, has completed flight testing aboard a Predator B MQ-9 Unmanned Aerial System. TRACER is a dual-band (UHF and VHF) synthetic-aperture radar capable of detecting and geo-locating objects that are buried, camouflaged or concealed under foliage.
MAVinci, based in Leimen near Heidelberg, Germany, has announced the introduction of SIRIUS II – a fully integrated orthofoto UAS. The system obtains aerial images and calculates orthofotos and three dimensional elevation models out of the image data.
Goodrich Corporation’s ISR Systems’ Princeton team (formerly Sensors Unlimited, Inc.) has introduced the smallest SWaP (size weight and power) short wave infrared camera for unmanned vehicles.
Mercury Computer Systems Inc. is now providing a SWaP-optimized hyper-spectral image processing and storage subsystem for use in multi-INT wide area surveillance equipment on UAS.
Aeryon Labs has announced the VideoZoom10x payload for the Aeryon Scout Micro VTOL UAS – a 1.2 kg man-packable UAS. With the ability to detect a human from over 2km away and identify someone from over 300m, the VideoZoom10x payload instantly delivers high-resolution, real-time tactical intelligence to the hands of an operator.