31 Oct 12. Insitu Pacific, the Australia-based subsidiary of Insitu Inc., announced today that it has successfully completed integration between its ScanEagle Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) and the McQ iScout Unattended Ground Sensor (UGS) and OmniWatch technologies. McQ is an industry leader in UGS technology and development with its UGS deployed in widespread service with the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Energy and a range of international customers. The McQ iScout sensor provides battlefield proven, covert, low power and long-endurance sensing capabilitywith best in class, low false alarm rates. Insitu Pacific engineers successfully integrated the ScanEagle UAS and the McQ UGS to enable UGS target detection alerts to be automatically displayed within ScanEagle’s Insitu multiple UAS software environment (I-MUSE) operating system as new targets. Once a target is detected, the iScout sensor automatically sends a notification to the UAS system operator by displaying the target location, detection type (seismic, magnetic, acoustic or infrared) and other relevant information on the ScanEagle operator’s I-MUSE graphic user interface (GUI). The operator is then able to automatically focus the ScanEagle’s sensors on the new contact to verify the data provided by iScout and OmniWatch and continue to track the target once it has moved beyond the OmniWatch camera range.
01 Nov 12. General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems and the U.S. Army Armament Research and Development Engineering Center (ARDEC) have successfully demonstrated a GPS-guided munition for use on small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The testing consisted of three separate engagements using a Tiger Shark UAV launching an 81mm mortar equipped with General Dynamics’ Roll Control Fixed Canard control system and an ARDEC-developed fuzing solution. All three mortars were launched from a UAV at altitudes of approximately 7,000 ft and guided to within seven meters of a GPS-identified target grid.