Informazioni Uav

[Avgvsto]

quali sono i principali aerei senza piloti?

quali ha l'italia?

per che scopi vengono usati?

[dread]

l'italia aveva 5 predator

ma uno ne è precipitato e ne sono rimasti 4

 

li utilizza in iraq come ricognitori

fin'ora gli UAV hanno solo questo compito, ma presto diventeranno veri e propri UCAV

 

c'è un progetto anche per un elicottero senza pilota

[davide_volante]

Scusa Dread mi sfugge la sigla UCAV....puoi rimediare? grazie

 

Poi qualcuno sa che motore monta il predator? Li dietro vedo un elica spingente ma cosa la muove? e se possibile le principali caratteristiche costruttive e prestazioni di volo.... grazie

 

argh, non puoi sbagliare il mio nome, vietatissimo fortuna che non ti do l'avvertimento...scherzo, anche perchè il post è del 18 giugno!

Modificato 13 Gennaio 2006 da dread

[Avgvsto]

penso sia Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle, cioè lo stesso più combat che dovrebbe indicare che è un vero e proprio aereo da combattimento.

[Gianni065]

Ormai di UAV, RPV e UCAV e altre sigle ce ne sono decine e decine di modelli.

 

Pertanto, consiglio di partire da questi siti web:

 

http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/uav.htm

 

http://www.uavworld.com/

 

nonchè questa:

 

http://www.answers.com/topic/unmanned-aerial-vehicle

[Gianni065]

Dimenticavo.

 

L'Italia ha in servizio vari tipi di rpv/uav.

 

La serie Mirach (qui ci sono il Mirach 26 ed il 20)

 

 

 

i piccolissimi Pointer

 

 

e infine i famosi Predator:

 

 

Poi ci sono altri programmi in corso, come il Falco e il Neuron (internazionale).

 

 

Per quanto riguarda a cosa servono...

 

inquadriamo bene le cose.

 

All'inizio nacquero i "drones" che erano dei velivoli/missili non pilotati, che seguivano una traiettoria preprogrammata, ed il cui scopo principale era quello di fungere da bersagli.

 

Poi i drones iniziarono ad essere utilizzati per la ricognizione, sempre con rotte preprogrammate, e infine si arrivò agli RPV, che avevano la caratteristica di essere radiocomandati a distanza.

 

Gli israeliani sono stati i primi a dare impulso all'utilizzo degli RPV in combattimento (lo IAI Scout), utilizzandoli come esche nelle missioni SEAD, tanto che il primo vero RPV militare americano, il Pioneer, era di progettazione israeliana, derivato dallo Scout.

 

Poi gli americani hanno introdotto la categoria degli UAV che sono una cosa un po' a parte: essi possono o non possono essere radiocomandati a distanza, ma in ogni caso hanno un computer di bordo intelligente, che è in grado di controllare il velivolo in maniera autonoma ed eseguire la missione assegnata.

Un UAV è molto più "intelligente" di un semplice drone.

 

Gli USA progettarono una intera famiglia di UAV, nell'ambito del programma TIER, ed i più famosi figli di quel programma sono il Predator ed il Global Hawk.

 

Poi sempre gli USA iniziarono a sperimentare i Predator con armamento aria-terra, in particolare uno-due missili Hellfire, e visti i risultati positivi hanno integrato il missile Hellfire sui loro Predator e hanno avviato i programmi UCAV, che sono dei veri e propri UAV da combattimento.

 

Quindi, le missioni tipiche dei teleguidati sono:

- Aerobersaglio (tipicamente i drones)

- Ricognizione (RPV e UAV)

- Attacco aria-terra (UCAV, il programma più avanzato è l'X-45)

 

In futuro è previsto che gli UCAV acquisiscano anche capacità Aria-Aria.

 

Per quanto riguarda l'Italia, i Mirach sono utilizzati come aerobersagli e per la ricognizione. I Pointer sono usati per la ricognizione a cortissimo raggio e per l'acquisizione di obiettivi per l'artiglieria. I Predator sono usati per la ricognizione e la sorveglianza.

Modificato 18 Giugno 2005 da Gianni065

[Washburn]

il mio uav preferito è:

Modificato 19 Luglio 2005 da Washburn

[easy]

provate anche http://www.uav.it/

[Dark Angel]

foto

[meason]

Davide Volante l'RQ1 monta un Bombardier-Rotax Type 912UL e 914UL da 100-115 HP a quattro cilindri e quattro tempi, raffreddati ad aria, da 1.352 e 1.211 cm cubi.

Gli MQ9 invece ha una turboelica Honeywell TPE331-10T da 950 shP.

[Ospite intruder]

UAS Market Challenges Traditional Aerospace

 

Jun 8, 2009

 

 

 

By Graham Warwick aviationweek.com

 

Mini-UAS

 

 

 

With armed forces taking unmanned aircraft more seriously, is the aerospace industrial base ready to meet the emerging requirements? The answer is yes, and no.

 

While most operational systems evolved from technology demonstrators, much of the innovative work on unmanned aircraft is being fostered by service laboratories working with small businesses. That leaves traditional aircraft manufacturers scrambling to catch up.

 

Asked at the media roundtable in April what he saw as the future of the U.S. tactical aircraft industrial base, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said simply “JSF and Reaper.” That he should see Lockheed Martin’s manned F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ unmanned Predator family as the only tactical platforms with a future is serving as a wake-up call for the industry.

 

“Look at a lot of successful UAVs—they came out of nowhere, not out of the major airframe primes,” says David Vos, senior director of control technologies at Rockwell Collins. “Not out of Northrop Grumman, but through its acquisition of Ryan [Aeronautical]. And not out of Boeing, but from Insitu and Frontier.”

 

Vos’s company Athena Technologies, a pioneer in lightweight, low-cost, high-reliability flight-control systems for UAVs, was itself acquired by Rockwell Collins in 2004, making the company a leading supplier of avionics for manned and unmanned aircraft. It is a pattern being repeated elsewhere, as in Boeing’s acquisition of successful small UAS maker Insitu to add to its earlier takeover of unmanned helicopter developer Frontier.

 

Insitu was a small Washington-state company that originally designed the ScanEagle for tuna hunting from fishing boats, and used local surfboard makers as its supply base. Now it is at the core of a Boeing effort to build an unmanned aircraft business that includes the A160T (now YMQ-18A) autonomous helicopter and Phantom Ray unmanned combat aircraft demonstrator.

 

The burgeoning small UAS market has also attracted Northrop Grumman, which has acquired the blended wing/body UAV product line developed by small rapid-prototyping company Swift Engineering and licensed one of the designs to Raytheon. BAE Systems has acquired small UAV maker Advanced Ceramics Research with an eye on the U.S. market.

 

But whether the traditional primes can maintain the rapid innovation and low cost for which the unmanned market is known remains to be seen, particularly as the Pentagon’s procurement regime gets a belated grip on the sector. John Langford, president of UAV developer Aurora Flight Sciences, believes the Navy/Marine Corps Small Tactical UAS/Tier 2 competition now underway, which seeks both early deployment and rigorous trials, could prove a test case for Defense Dept. efforts to normalize UAS procurement.

 

As traditional primes look to penetrate the unmanned systems market, their experience with manned platforms might not turn out to be quite the advantage it seems. “Rockwell Collins’s success in UAVs is entirely down to approaching the avionics with a clean sheet, and not shoehorning manned-aircraft systems into unmanned aircraft,” says Vos.

 

Because the unmanned market is emergent, not established, the industrial base is still evolving from its back-shop origins. “Today we are probably on the third generation of UASs, and it’s the first generation to have broken out to the mainstream,” says Langford. He notes that the system sports DNA that stems back to model aircraft that got fancy and to manned aircraft with their cockpits yanked out.

 

On the payload side, there are still examples of manned aircraft systems being scaled down for unmanned platforms, but increasingly sensors are being developed around the specific advantages and constraints of UAVs. An example is the Forester foliage-penetration radar built for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by Syracuse Research and flown on the A160T.

 

Forester takes advantage of the unmanned helicopter’s long endurance, high altitude and precise low-speed control to track people moving under the cover of trees. But the 50 km. (31 mi.)-range UHF sensor weighs in at 630 lb., including a large antenna, so the Army is developing the 15 km.-range, 150-lb. Artemis 25-GHz. radar for Northrop Grumman’s MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned helicopter. Artemis will perform synthetic-aperture imaging, moving-target indication and foliage penetration.

 

Lockheed Martin’s Tracer VHF/UHF counter-concealment radar for the Army’s MQ-1C Sky Warrior is to be tested on a NASA-owned Predator B this summer. It is one of several programs developing radars that can be carried in addition to electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) sensors. Another is the Lightweight UAV Radar, a small-business research project to demonstrate a sensor weighing just 1 lb., designed to give the Army’s AAI RQ-7 Shadow tactical UAS a synthetic-aperture imaging and moving-target indication capability.

 

Unmanned aircraft use in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced an insatiable appetite for full-motion video, while highlighting some of the limitations of today’s EO/IR payloads in terms of resolution and field of view. The Air Force plans to address some of the issues by fielding the Gorgon Stare wide-area airborne surveillance pod on MQ-9 Reapers. This will provide not one, but 12, video “spots” per aircraft. Longer term, BAE Systems’ Argus-IS gigapixel sensor, developed for Darpa and to be test-flown on the A160T, will provide at least 65 video streams.

 

Langford, meanwhile, believes the demand for full-motion video will have its limits. “The paradigm of just staring at video is crazy. You will lose the bandwidth war that way.” He is convinced there will be a lot more processing on the vehicle itself, particularly those that stay aloft a long time. “Very long persistence UAVs will be forensic tools,” he says, with analysts able to mine thousands of hours of stored video.

 

Propulsion is another area where the unmanned industry is innovative and immature. Most of the engines in use come from manned aircraft or have their origins in a non-aviation market, like motorcycles. Efforts to develop efficient heavy-fuel engines burning JP-8, which the military prefers for logistic reasons, have proved problematic, particularly for small air vehicles needing lightweight powerplants.

 

“It is not a matter of technology, it’s the business case,” says Langford. “Athena was started [by Aurora] out of frustration that no one made a good flight control system for UAVs. Someone needs to do for engines what Athena does for flight controls.” There is a need for good heavy-fuel engines below 120 hp., and Aurora is actively looking at the business case, he says, adding “the problem is that not much else needs that engine.”

 

Now the demand for persistence from UAVs of all sizes is pushing the unmanned industry in a distinctly different direction. For larger, longer-endurance aircraft like the Qinetiq Zephyr, solar cells and advanced batteries look to be the answer. If endurance is pushed well beyond three months, as Darpa plans with its Vulture program, then the combination of solar arrays and fuel cells in a regenerative power system look like potentially the best solution.

 

Liquid hydrogen is being considered to power high-altitude UAVs, Aurora and Boeing having tested the fuel in a modified Ford automotive engine. AeroVironment is building the Global Observer, which will use liquid hydrogen in an internal-combustion engine to drive a generator powering four electric motors. The goal is endurance at 65,000 ft. of about a week.

 

In the small UAS sector, fuel cells offer to dramatically extend the endurance of hand-launched air vehicles now powered by rechargeable batteries. Protonex has contracts to modify AeroVironment’s widely used Raven B and special-forces’ Puma AE air vehicles with hybrid fuel-cell/battery powerpacks that promise to boost the persistence of these platforms by a factor of up to four. The Office of Naval Research plans to fly an experimental tactical UAV with 24-hr. endurance on fuel-cell power

 

Today electric propulsion gets up to a kilowatt or two, enough to power a small UAV, “but as we move forward it will go up dramatically,” Langford says. “There is also the potential for distributing propulsion around the aircraft, rather than having one big engine.” Aurora is experimenting with this in its Excaliber unmanned combat aircraft prototype, which combines a swiveling turbojet with battery-powered ducted fans for vertical takeoff and landing.

 

“I’m bullish we will see a lot more electric-based distributed propulsion. It could become a driver in aviation,” he says. The advantage of electric propulsion is it taps into the rapidly developing commercial market to power electronics and cars, technology that can be repackaged for aerospace application. Langford believes there is also long-term potential in high-temperature semiconductor motors as an alternative to turbine engines in larger unmanned aircraft.

 

Another challenge facing traditional aircraft manufacturers is the expectation of low costs established by the emerging unmanned industry. “It’s a different price point. We’ve demonstrated we can pack a lot more for the same dollars, size weight and power into an unmanned aircraft today than a manned aircraft,” says Vos.

 

“It has less to do with unmanned versus manned than that it’s a new market. We can start with a clean sheet, not much legacy thinking and without the same market barriers. [And] leverage the latest technologies to offer a new price point and significantly improved functionality.”

 

Both Langford and Vos are convinced advances in unmanned aircraft will ultimately benefit manned aviation. “It is a strategic thrust [at Rockwell Collins] to take unmanned into manned,” says Vos. This includes the company’s work for Darpa on damage-tolerant autonomous flight controls, which could be used to improve the safety of manned aircraft.

 

The vision of a next-generation airspace system in which all aircraft self-identify and fly precise four-dimensional trajectories applies equally to manned and unmanned aircraft, they believe. The key is getting the price of avionics down to where everything that flies can be equipped—“even tagging large birds,” says Langford, semi-seriously.

 

Greatly increased automation is key to many of the military’s long-term plans for unmanned aircraft, but this is not an insurmountable challenge, says Vos. “We are doing 4D trajectories now with the Shadow UAV. A lot of the stuff is already there,” he says. “The rate limiter is cultural adaptation.”