Advanced UAS Stretches its Sea Legs

Airbus Helicopters and the French Armament General Directorate (DGA) announced on 15 May 2023 that they’d jointly tested Airbus’s VSR700 Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) in its operational configuration from a ship at sea.

The test-flight, the platform’s first in its full operational configuration, saw the VSR700 perform no fewer than eighty fully-autonomous take-offs and landings from a helicopter-deck-equipped civil vessel operating off France’s Atlantic coast in the vicinity of Brittany.

Nicolas Delmas, head of Airbus Helicopter’s VSR700 program, stated: “This flight-test campaign was an important step for the VSR700 program as it allowed us to validate the excellent performance of the drone in operational conditions, which were representative of its future missions. The VSR700 prototype opened its flight envelope in winds above forty-knots, accumulated eight-hours of testing in 14 flights, and made successful landings in several different sea states.”

In 2022, the autonomous take-off and landing capabilities of the VSR700 were tested from the selfsame vessel using an Optionally Piloted Vehicle (OPV) based on a modified Guimbal Cabri G2 equipped with the autonomous take-off and landing (ATOL) system developed for the VSR700. The most recent flight-test campaign was conducted with the Système de Drone Aérien pour la Marine (SDAM) demonstrator and fully validated the capabilities of the system as part of the SDAM study awarded in 2017 to Airbus Helicopters and Naval Group.

Autonomous take-off and landing capabilities are among the VSR700’s key assets and are made possible by dint of Airbus’s DeckFinder system—a proprietary hardware/software architecture by which the autonomous launch and recovery of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs)—even during operations in harsh environmental and degraded visual conditions —is facilitated independently of GNSS/GPS to an accuracy of ten-to-twenty centimeters.

The May 2023 VSR700 flight-test campaign followed two series of trials conducted in cooperation with the DGA in late 2022 and early 2023 from Southern France’s Levant Island test center. Subject trials evaluated the SDAM prototype’s handling qualities, the capabilities of its sensor array—which comprised a maritime surveillance radar, an electro optical sensor, and an AIS receiver—and comprehensively vetted the machine’s ability to operate in the marine environment.

Future flight-testing will see the second VSR700 prototype undertake its maiden flight ahead of latter-2023 evaluations onboard a French Navy FREMM.

FMI: www.airbus.com/en/products-services/helicopters