SOR in the Media, page-10

Proactive: https://bit.ly/2JzpaWF

The new Stealth and Planck collaboration will focus on enabling the ASV to launch and land drones.

This ability would enable the long runtimes of the ASV to be combined with the high speed of drones.

Drones could be launched from the ASV at any time whilst on patrol, effectively doubling the ASV’s surveillance coverage capabilities and could also recharge once landed on the ASV and be relaunched.

In addition, the unique perspectives of the ASV and its drone can be combined to give an expanded patrol and surveillance dataset, enable more powerful AI use cases for mapping, navigation, object and person recognition, object and person tracking and scene reasoning.

The parties will also assess the potential of integrating mobile tethered drones with the ASV.

This will give additional deployment options for drone-equipped ASVs to work at facilities near to controlled airspaces and at those that have safety requirements that would normally preclude drone operation, such as airports and energy facilities.

Traditional ground-tethered drones can only fly in a single location, however, drones tethered from the ASV could be mobile and move with the ASV whilst airborne.