Technology update

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January/February 2006

How UAVs can detect and avoid

UAVs are set to become an increasingly important part of aerospace design and engineering, with roles far broader than military reconnaissance and combat missions. "But to operate in civilian airspace, UAVs must be able to emulate a human pilot's ability to avoid a collision—without a transponder," said Allan Cantle, President and CEO of Nallatech, which specializes in COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) FPGA-based (Field-Programmable Gate Array) computing technology. "And meteorological aircraft needs to capture eight hours of images on a flight, and then to compress and store it in a format suitable for subsequent off-line analysis. These are two examples of the requirements that are driving the development of supercomputers in the skies."
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