Technical Challenges For Small UAV Payloads

By Chris Johnson, HoodTech Vision, Inc.

The small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) marketplace has recently displayed dramatic growth in the variety of airframes and payloads. While large, familiar UAVs like Predator, Shadow, and Global Hawk garner much of the press and attention, small, unheralded UAVs deliver the majority of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) video and execute the bulk of sorties. The small UAVs are represented by micro-UAVs as tiny as a hummingbird, to UAVs that weigh 150 lbs and lift >10 kg payloads. Small UAVs are generally launched by hand, by an accelerating launcher, or are vertical take-off and landing (VTOL).

Payload engineers are always faced with limited budgets in terms of mass, volume, and power for small UAVs. In parallel, however, the same engineers are asked to deliver very narrow field of- view images, exotic on-board image processing, lossless video compression, multi-color simultaneous imaging, and hundreds of other technically advanced attributes that are difficult to execute in a laboratory, let alone from a small aircraft buffeting in the wind. This article will discuss some of the high-level issues that suppliers and customers need to address when considering the delivery of video to the ground from a small UAV.