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By Matt Vance The first article in this two-part series explored seven suggestions for consideration in your first UAS purchase: clarity of ownership objectives; vehicle performance requirements; propulsion system; runway independence; additional system components; budget, and value of a market survey. Part two explores considerations in selecting a UAS supplier and issues associated with taking ... Read More

By Matt Vance Are you thinking about buying an unmanned aircraft system for research in your academic program? I’ve been there. This two-part series builds on lessons learned from purchasing three different classes of UAS. The first question you need to ask is, what do I want or need to do with it? Identifying the objective of ownership is the most important consideration because all ... Read More

In a series of papers by Clothier, et al., a risk-based approach for the classification of UAS (Table 1) for determining airworthiness in Australia is proposed. The “type” columns in the matrix, in order of increasing magnitude of loss, are grouped based on the maximum degree of loss the UAS could cause, independent of where it crashes. Accordingly, each type column represents a grouping of ... Read More

Australia Proposes to Allow Commercial Unmanned Aerial Systems to Fly Without an Operator’s or Remote Pilot Certificate Under Certain Conditions Comment Period Extended Until June 30, 2014 The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) in Australia is the equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States (U.S.) and is responsible for regulating the civil use of Unmanned ... Read More

US Department of Defense 2015 Budget Analysis As part of the President’s budget submission to Congress (PB15), the Department of Defense (DoD) publishes information on all of their programs. We went through all of the budget sheets by department and flagged every program that contained a relevant key word (unmanned, UAV, etc.). Raw data (Excel format) is available for PB13, PB14 and PB15. ... Read More

What Budget Reductions May Mean for the Future of the Defense Industrial Base Senator Mark Warner Address to the Atlantic Council and National Defense Industrial Association April 1, 2014 For the past several years, the Department of Defense has struggled with continuing resolutions and budget uncertainty. With the passage of the 2013 Bipartisan Budget Act ... Read More

Note: We are using this analysis for justification of airspace for small UAS. Please send feedback ASAP to make for the most robust analysis. Remote sensing will be a major capability used in a variety of markets once commercial UAS operations are allowed. Using data from current commercial cameras and UAVs we can give a general profile of a UAS remote sensing mission (maximum altitude, coverage ... Read More

Since AUVSI’s forecast in 2013, we have further refined our data sets to give a more accurate depiction of global defense robotics investments, culminating in our 2014 forecasts. Our data sets, with commentary on accuracy: 2014 United States President’s Defense Budget (available here ) – The budget passed and signed into law differs slightly in gross numbers from the submitted budget, but ... Read More

Self driving cars offer great potential savings to the United States economy and public. Assuming self driving cars obey traffic laws, communicate with each other, and the US public fully embraces the capability, we can look at a couple areas of potential savings to understand the impact self driving cars can make. Everyday in the United States, 42 lives are lost due to incidents involving ... Read More

There has been recent discussion on the safety of UAS versus manned systems. The United States Air Force publishes safety data on all of their major airframes, both manned and unmanned. To understand relative safety, lets look at two pieces of data. First, looking at C4ISR platforms before and after the introduction of RQ-1 (Predator), C4ISR is a much safer mission, with only one lost life in the past ... Read More

To inform some of our research efforts we developed the following map of the major parts of a UAV. Feel free to use but please reference us so anyone else who may want to use it can get any updates we make. If you think we left out something important, email us . (If graphic does not load below, refresh screen or go here ) Your browser is not able to display frames. Please visit the ... Read More

We get a lot of calls from companies and groups looking to purchase a small UAS for various purposes. Many of these groups know very little about UAS so our discussions focus on education and better understanding and articulating their needs so they can find a matching system. Using data from the robotics directory , we’ve compiled a list of statistics and graphs of hand launched and small VTOL ... Read More

AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems Program Review is a great three days to get up to speed on the major happenings in unmanned systems. A major part of this program is updates from major government program officers from the US military. The US Army recently sent us an update to their slides to share. For completeness, we are also sharing US Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force presentations, all linked here ... Read More

We filtered through the Ground Robot Directory , brushed off our knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem, and created a list of every ground robot that could fit through circular pipe of various sizes. Want to know which robots? Subscribe and enjoy all of your new found knowledge. Feel free to email me if you have any questions or would li Read More

We are often asked to compare the hourly cost of manned flights with the equivalent cost of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). This is not an easy question to answer because there is not a standardized and accepted protocol for calculating costs per flight hour. Further, there are numerous ways that costs per flight hour may be calculated because of the varying metrics that may be included in ... Read More