Logos Technologies announced on May 8 that it had successfully conducted advanced flight testing of the company’s Redkite wide-area sensor aboard the Insitu Integrator unmanned aircraft system (UAS).
The demonstration, which took place in Boardman, Oregon, confirmed that Redkite could capture stabilized, wide-area motion imagery (WAMI) and successfully stream it to multiple handheld devices on the ground from the payload bay of the tactical Group 3 UAS. This is the second successful airborne test with the Integrator.
“Back in February, we worked with Insitu to demonstrate that Redkite could handle the launch and in-flight characteristics of Integrator,” said John Marion, president of Logos Technologies. “Now, we confirmed that Redkite captures, renders and stabilizes imagery in real time with its compact, onboard processor, streaming it to the users.”
Redkite is compact, lightweight and comes in two configurations: a platform-agnostic pod for manned and unmanned aircraft and an integrated payload module.
Both versions image over 12km² at once – detecting, tracking and recording all significant movers within the scene in real time. Redkite also stores up to eight hours of geo-tagged mission data for forensic analysis.
When combined with the Integrator, the WAMI system will provide the tactical commander with new intelligence and surveillance resources, delivering real-time imagery straight to the mobile device in their hand.
The next step for the Redkite on Integrator is to further reduce the system weight to allow for full endurance flights, said Josiah Gruber, lead engineer for Redkite, who added: “We also plan to test the cross-cueing between Redkite and the onboard full-motion gimbal sensor.”
May 10, 2017
