A Navy team has deployed to Christmas Island to conduct further tests with the ScanEagle Unmanned Aerial System, including it's ViDAR sensor, as Sentient Vision Systems showcases the visual detection and ranging technology to the US Coast Guard.
Navy Daily reported the Navy Unmanned Aircraft Systems Unit has been testing their ability to conduct Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) operation without support from ScanEagle manufacturer Insitu Pacific – a first for the detachment.
This has included tests of ViDAR performing maritime search tasks as it detects and locates objects visually.
“Employing the ScanEagle in a surface search role is enabling a far greater area of coverage than we could previously achieve,” Detachment Commander, Lieutenant Ben Hanson-Murphy said.
“The team have done an outstanding job establishing the operating site at short notice with minimal preparation and then successfully establish a safe flight operations envelope around the island.”
During the deployment, the detachment has consolidated operator training, gathered valuable test data, and gained experience in an operational-like environment, with flights offshore enduring for up to ten hours at a time.
According to Navy Daily, by the fourth week of the three month deployment, the team had achieved approximately 82 flight hours, with over 12 hours of specific ViDAR operation.
The trial is scheduled until early November and will lay the foundations for use of ViDAR at sea early in 2017.
Meanwhile, late last week Sentient Vision Systems, the Melbourne-based developer of ViDAR, announced the successful completion of its live demonstration of the system to the US Coast Guard.
The trial was conducted off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, over a week and highlighted ViDAR’s capability to find objects of interest at great distance, whilst searching over wide tracts of ocean from a small UAS.
The US Coast Guard demonstration of ViDAR involved an exhaustive series of search flights designed to find vessels and objects representative of Coast Guard missions. The targets were placed in the search area at locations unknown to the ViDAR operator.
Highlights from the demonstration include ViDAR successfully, and autonomously, detecting a fast boat at 17.7nm, a life raft at 3.7nm, a person in the water at 1.9nm and a shipping vessel at over 33nm. Each time ViDAR detected an object, a small image was sent to the ground automatically, allowing the operator to move from initial detection, to classification and identification in seconds.
“Detection is critical to bringing reliability to the surveillance task," Simon Olsen, Sentient’s director of BD, strategy and partnerships said. "With limited size and power, small and tactical UAS are heavily constrained in what they can carry and are often therefore limited to observing what has already been found.”
“ViDAR is the first technology with the ability to conduct wide area search from a small/tactical UAS,” he said.