Vector Hawk brings Thunderbirds to life
Look no strings!
Not one, not two but three autonomous vehicles recently did their thing
Submarine Marlin MK2, received instructions from Ocean Aero’s Submaran surface vehicle commanded via underwater acoustic comms. Marlin then released a container housing the fixed-wing Vector Hawk drone to the surface, where it unfolded its wings and took off.
The Submaran monitored the entire operation and relayed instructions from a ground control station.
Thats quite a thing. Vector Hawk was unveiled in 2014.
“We are proud to deliver Vector Hawk, a waterproof system that provides leading edge multi-mission capabilities in all environments,” said Kevin Westfall, director of Unmanned Solutions at Lockheed Martin’s Mission Systems and Training business. “The Vector Hawk can be field reconfigured to multiple missions including fixed-wing, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), and tilt-rotor enabling VTOL with transition to fixed wing flight. Our fixed wing variants may be hand or tube launched, and VTOL and tilt-rotor variants may be launched from land or water surfaces.”
Vector Hawk features fully autonomous flight, landing and fail-safes. It is inaudible at operational slant ranges. The data link features a high bandwidth software defined radio, mesh networking (including 3G, 4G, and LTE cellular), over-the-air reconfiguration, and is capable of employing a variety of waveforms. With an open architecture, reconfigurable variants, adaptable data link, and scalable payload, Vector Hawk is engineered for unmatched capability.
