Lockheed Martin has unveiled its new reconfigurable Vector Hawk small unmanned air vehicle (UAV), a system with a 4lb (1.8kg) gross take-off weight that can be switched between fixed-wing, vertical take-off and landing and tiltrotor operations.
The airframer, which unveiled Vector Hawk at AUVSI’s annual conference, believes Vector Hawk has a wide range of potential applications.
"We are proud to deliver Vector Hawk, a waterproof system that provides leading-edge multi-mission capabilities in all environments," says Kevin Westfall, director of unmanned solutions in Lockheed’s mission systems and training division.
"Our fixed-wing variants may be hand or tube launched, and the VTOL and tilt-rotor variants may be launched from land or water."
Vector Hawk also has the ability to conduct fully autonomous flights and landings, says Lockheed.
In addition, Vector Hawk’s data link uses a high-bandwidth, software-defined radio. It has mesh networking with 3G, 4G and LTE cellular networks and can employ a variety of waveforms.
The aircraft’s software has open architecture and has an adaptable data link and carry different sized payloads.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
