Jay Clemens
Boeing‘s Insitu subsidiary has demonstrated the new wide-area maritime surface search and identification feature of its unmanned aerial vehicle to the U.K. navy, military officials and industry representatives.
Insitu said Tuesday it installed the ViDAR payload in a ScanEagle UAV that was used to conduct various maritime missions during the Royal Navy’s Unmanned Warrior demonstration held in Benbecula, Scotland.
“During one flight our team spotted a target 19 nm away before the exercise began,†said Suzanne McNamara, vice president of business development at Insitu.
Insitu and Australia-based Sentient Vision Systems jointly developed the ViDAR system with an automated target finding system on a group two unmanned platform.
During the demonstration, ScanEagle completed more than 55 hours of flight, detected hundreds of large and small objects with ViDAR and identified objects in varying environmental conditions.
Insitu also signed an agreement with Sentient in May to distribute ViDAR software in the global small UAS market.
