Miniature UAV
It is too large to be conveniently carried by soldiers and is normally hauled around in a HMMWV(Humvee) vehicle or the like, and so the Army asked AeroVironment to develop a smaller version.
[citation needed] Encouraged by such successes, AeroVironment is also working on a newer version of the Pointer, named the "Puma", with greater endurance and payload.
Weighing just 1.3 kg, it features onboard intelligence, all-digital communications and a map-based touch-screen control which enables new users to operate the vehicles with only minutes of training.
Its unique modular design allows for quick-connect payloads of different types and its arms and legs are changeable in the field, with no tools.
European EADS organization is developing a small UAV named the Tracker, which features a wide-span wing, twin booms for payload and so on, and a central pod with tractor and puller propellers.
[citation needed] Lehmann Aviation Ltd, the French manufacturer, has developed man-portable (92 cm wingspan) lightweight (1,25 kg) line of UAVs: LP960 (2007), LV580 (2009), LM450 (2010) – with a common Ground Control System.
[citation needed] Lehmann Aviation UAVs were designed to fly with up to 45 km/h wind (25 kn), in different climate conditions (humidity, dry air), with the temperature range from −25 °C to +60 °C.
LP960 was designed for orthomosaics (Digital Elevation Model) and HD vertical images for the needs of public and private sectors (mostly construction and geodesy companies as well as scientific organisations[6]).
It is made mostly of plastic foam, suggesting something like a Nerf toy, and uses an electric motor driving a pusher propeller as a powerplant, making it very quiet.
The Swallow is of more conventional configuration than the Dragon Eye, roughly comparable to the AeroVironment Pointer, with long sailplane wings and a tail-mounted propeller.
[citation needed] Rafael of Israel has built a man-portable UAV also named the SkyLite, which is fired out of a tube like an antitank missile, and has an endurance of about an hour.
[citation needed] ZALA 421-12 is a flying wing UAV specially designed by A-Level Aerosystems, Izhevsk, Russia for Federal Security Service.
The UAV is powered by electric motor driving a small propeller in the nose, with rechargeable batteries permitting an hour of continuous flight at the range of 40 km.
In 2014 The Ranger systems will be deployed in South Africa, Malawi, Namibia, Australia, Thailand, India and Europe on a variety of humanitarian,[12] anti poaching,[13] precision agriculture and security operations.
[15] High wing electric powered, 1.4m wingspan the Voyager is a conventional pusher airframe with a maximum AUW of 3.5 kg with a wide CG range useful for different payload configurations.
The UAV features automatic takeoff and parachute landing, allowing reduction of workload and reducing configuration mistakes, identified as a major hazard in day-to-day civilian photomapping operations.
[citation needed] The US Army has been interested in developing MAVs that could be deployed as munitions, fired from artillery or unguided rocket launcher pods.
It had a tiny camera in its lower fuselage, and relayed both imagery and its own current GPS coordinates back to the warship or artillery battery that fired it.
The baseline version of the SilentEyes would be strictly a glider, but its glide ratio of 11:1 would allow it to stay in the air for a half-hour if released from typical Predator operational altitudes.
[citation needed] The little UAV could carry a gimbaled infrared or color TV camera, with the video compressed for transmission by a UHF communications link over line-of-sight ranges.
The MAV project's goals was to develop a microdrone whose largest dimension was no more than 15 centimeters (5.9 in); would carry a day-night imager; have an endurance of about two hours; and be very low cost.
[citation needed] MAVs are a class of man-portable miniature UAVs whose size enables them to be used in low altitude, close-in support operations.
[citation needed] One particularly intriguing option for both propulsion and power was a button-sized silicon microturbine ("jet") engine developed by Al Epstein at MIT during the 1990s.
It was expected to have a thrust-to-weight ratio of about 100—incredible compared to any "macroscale" engine but a logical consequence of scaling the technology down in size—and run at about 1.2 million RPM, making bearings a tricky issue.
Design of such a small aircraft was constrained by the fact that at such scales, the air becomes a highly viscous medium, or in aerodynamic terms a mesicopter had a low Reynolds number.
Allied Aerospace, which had bought out Micro Craft, demonstrated a scaled-up SLADF, while Honeywell performed tests with their own ducted-fan vehicle, named iSTAR.
[citation needed] In the spring of 2003, AeroVironment performed the first flight of the Hornet, which is similar to the Wasp but has a straight rectangular wing with a slightly greater span of 38 centimeters (15 in) and, more significantly, is powered by fuel cells.
The fuel cells are built into the top of the wing, where they combine oxygen in the ambient air with hydrogen produced internally by the MAV through reaction of a hydride material with water.
It was built by the French defense aerospace research agency ONERA, working with the Royal Military Academy of Brussels, and is primarily intended to be a testbed for miniature sensor technologies.
Some also consider using a Reciprocating Chemical Muscle for actuating flapping wing MAVs such as the Entomopter pioneered by Robert C. Michelson of Georgia Tech's nonprofit Research Institute.
