MODEL BASED AUTOPILOT
Our autopilot system delivers industry-leading control, real-time adaptability, and seamless integration across multiple UAV platforms. Designed for both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, it ensures precision flight, mission flexibility, and safety in all conditions.
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Features
Dynamic Trajectory Generation
The autopilot automatically calculates and adjusts flight trajectories in real time, ensuring optimal performance in changing conditions such as environmental factors or geofencing data. Additional mission specific sensors, such as optimal/camera, can be integrated real-time into the trajectory planning algorithm.
3D Flight Path Following
Our system predicts and follows highly accurate flight paths, improving mission planning and reducing the risk of deviation.
Advanced State Machine
The UAV operator interacts with the mission through an advanced state machine. The state machine associates platform states to allowed state transitions. This creates intuitive operator interactions with complex missions that may include phases such as “taxi to runway”, “execute secondary mission”, “loiter” or “hover” to pause mission execution, intermediate “landing” and “take-off” as part of a complex compound mission.
High Level of Autonomy
The control system displays a very high level of autonomy minimizing required operator interactions. The UAV automatically generates flight trajectories that respect the platform’s flight envelope and flight dynamics.
Automatic Terrain Following
The autopilot actively estimates wind conditions and terrain data to adjust flight paths, ensuring smooth landings and efficient flight routes.
Payload Computer
The autopilot contains a dedicated payload computer that is fully customizable, allowing field programmable integration of non-flight related sensors such as image processing, gimbal, payload monitoring and deployment or other sensors required for successful mission completion.
Designed for Maximum Flexibility
We support all vehicle types:
- Fixed-Wing Vehicles: For conventional runway operations with air traffic control features like heading hold, speed hold, altitude hold, and loitering.
- VTOL/Quadcopters/Multirotors: Configurable for hover, vertical takeoff and landing, with independent yaw control and modes for yaw direction, including along track and into relative wind.
- Tilt-Wing Aircraft: Supports both VTOL and conventional flight with scheduled transitions.
- Rotary Wing: Compatible with helicopters with main and tail rotors. Includes tunable control allocation and reconfigurability for servo failure, plus rotor wake control for managing yaw during hover and forward flight.
- Additional features include configurable VTOL axis prioritization for control authority saturation and pre-programmed yaw sequences for complex maneuvers in hover.
Safety and Certification
The Sovereign autopilot uses a full system model in combination with auto-code generation, eliminating human coding errors. Adhering to aerospace standards (DO-178C, DO-331 and DO-254) ensures certifiability. The development workflow contains Monte-Carlo simulations spanning environmental, sensor-faults and model parameters, creating a fist-time-right, robust controller tuning. The deployment code is automatically generated once the statistical results show that the system is capable of safely dealing with the environmental and systemic conditions as defined by the mission requirements. This ensures flight stability and performance, even in the event of system faults, extreme conditions and model inaccuracies.
Distributed Redundancy
The autopilot is designed with redundancy in mind, allowing customers to link multiple autopilots to obtain a redundant architecture.
Vehicle Limits
The autopilot only plans flight trajectories that respect vehicle limits, such as maximum bank angle, load limits and stall margin, ensuring flight safety.
Vehicle Performance Adherence
The autopilot only executes flight paths that respect vehicle performance limits, such as maximum bank angle and stall speed, ensuring flight safety.
Geofence Avoidance
The system automatically generates routes around geofences and restricted areas, ensuring mission compliance while avoiding no-fly zones.
Detect and Avoid
The control system can be integrated with object detection technologies (ADS-B, FLARM, radar and traffic management systems) to automatically generate avoidance trajectories, based on air separation rules when an intrusive object is detected.
BVLOS
The autopilot offers optional redundant command and control data links (LTE, Iridium, Inmarsat and other Satcom links) depending on mission profile and customer preference.
Technical Specifications
General Information
- Power Input: 9 - 36VDC
- Power: 15 W
- Temperature: -40 to 85C
- Weight: 700g to 1,400g depending on configuration
Communication
- Radio: Satel Mission Critical Radio
- Internal LTE, 4G/5G
- Optional Internal SatCom (Iridium)
Sensors
- GNSS: Septentrio Anti-jamming, Anti-spoofing Advanced Interference Monitoring and Mitigation
- AHRS: HBK Microstrain
- Air Data: Honeywell TruStability HSC Series up to 200 kts
- Downward looking LiDar