Ross Wilkers
Lockheed Martin has unveiled a new small unmanned aerial vehicle that the company built to be waterproof and to function with autonomous flight, landing and fail-safe features.
“Vector Hawk” weighs four pounds, has a four-inch vertical profile and a software-defined radio that works to help carry out mobile mesh networking tasks, the company said Tuesday.
“The Vector Hawk can be field reconfigured to multiple missions including fixed-wing, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), and tilt-rotor enabling VTOL with transition to fixed wing flight,” said Kevin Westfall, director of unmanned solutions for Lockheed’s mission systems and training business.
“Our fixed wing variants may be hand or tube launched, and VTOL and tilt-rotor variants may be launched from land or water surfaces.â€
Lockheed also built Vector Hawk with an open architecture, designed the data link to be adaptable and aims for the UAV to have reconfigurable variants.
