Aerospace development company Blue Bear has successfully demonstrated the simultaneous remote launch of seven drones.
Late last month the company successfully showed seven drones simultaneously taking off with its push button ‘remote launch’ technology, which allows a remote operator, virtually anywhere in the world, to be able to command a fleet of VTOL Fixed Wing UAS to take off and transition into individual or cooperative swarming missions.
A fully autonomous remote launch functionality makes the prospect of fully autonomous drone delivery and centralised command and control a clear reality, said Blue Bear.
The Bedfordshire, UK-based company is developing technology to enable multiple drones carry out simultaneous tasks, controlled by a single user creating a swarm effect. In April this year engineers at the firm demonstrated their Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) control technology with five drones and in October with 20 drones from different manufacturers.
The company’s Ghost unmanned aerial system (UAS), which comes in both a standard fixed fuselage configuration or equipped with a plug and play modular fuselage bay was used as part of the demonstration. The UAS were fitted with Blue Bear’s avionics, plug and play open architectures and SmartConnect technology, making it fully autonomous.
Ghost has been designed with modular architecture, that Blue Bear says enables it to be easily fitted with payloads from one of a “growing ecosystem of payload providers” working with the company. Engineers at the firm are currently adapting the modular payload bay for medical delivery applications.
Ian Williams-Wynn, managing director of Blue Bear said, “We can now retrofit our SmartConnect, open architectures, autopilots and other avionics to third party UAS, UGVs, USVs and UxVs to enable them to utilise the growing ecosystem of plug and play payloads, commanded by Blue Bear Centurion Command and Control software.
“This provides platform suppliers from air, land and maritime domains with the ability to plug their systems into any Blue Bear Centurion equipped system, providing the operator with a single command and control platform for all their multi-domain unmanned assets.”
