AUS&R Expo – Early Reviews

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

The HoverMast tethered unmanned vehicle will hover above the waters of the Superland lake, an autonomous UAVs which allows its operators to monitor distant locations.

The tethered UAV was developed by the Israeli SkySapience, based in the Yokneam High-Tech Park. It’s tethered to a ground vehicle as it flies and moves along with it. It hovers at a height of 4-50 meters, receiving commands from its operators through the tether.

The HoverMast has both military and civilian uses: It can supply “beyond the hill” intelligence to ground forces, help Electric Corporation personnel check power lines, monitor large facilities such as airports and gas fields, or gather intelligence for spy agencies or law enforcement units.

The information is gathered by the UAV’s payload, which includes a camera, radar, a radio for communications relay capabilities, or any other piece of equipment weighing less than 6 kilograms.

The HoverMast’s advantage is its simplicity: It can remain in the air indefinitely since it’s tethered to a vehicle, it runs on electricity so it doesn’t require fuel, and there’s very little maintenance involved. There’s no need to train the operators, either, since they send a limited number of commands to the vehicle using a small tablet: On, standby, take-off, landing. The UAV can operate from any ground vehicle, small ATVs to military jeeps to civilian pickup trucks. Despite it’s very high efficiency it’s absurdly simple for a UAV.

The G-Nius is an unmanned vehicle in operational use in the IDF, used by the army mainly for border patrols and perimeter defense. A would-be terrorist running across one of them while trying to sneak across a security fence would probably decide to run away – the vehicle is designed for intimidation, having a strange and unfamiliar shape and with many parts painted black.

IHLS – Israel Homeland Security

The designer is Yaron Luvaton, a vehicle design specialist who helped design the IDF’s G-Nius vehicles. Yaron is a Bezalel Academy graduate, and according to him “I get the necessary details from the client, including what’s the message they want the vehicle to get across. My job is to take a platform, vehicle, wheels, chassis and other accessories (cameras, antennae, radar systems, all according to the client’s requirements), and design an efficient vehicle with appropriate capabilities and form. Outer form is important for intimidation. For that I use shapes that look advanced, futuristic and sophisticated, even mysterious. The G-Nius is designed so that from the side it’s hard to know if it’s manned or unmanned. There are no windows, and the mystery is intimidating.”

Yaron says that the idea to paint some of the vehicle parts black (including the cameras) was taken from traditional Japanese theater, where scary characters are painted black. The design work is conducted in his studio, using manual sketches and computer-assisted-design. Clients send him sketches in two or three dimension, and Yaron uses these to develop the vehicle’s final form.

Yaron specializes in designing manned and unmanned vehicles, including boats and ships in the U.S. As a former tank operator in the IDF he is fond of army vehicles. “Back then I learned how important it is for even a tank to be well designed, so that the crew could operate efficiently while feeling comfortable.”

No vehicle – land, air and sea – will budge without an engine. The Israeli Bental company, based in the Golan Heights, specializes in developing engines and power sources for ground, aerial and naval systems. In the upcoming expo the company will display a variety of engines in different sizes: An engine that controls the movements of a tank’s main gun, other tank components, air purification pumps for tanks, and more. Aeronautic components presented by the company include UAV engines and actuators, the components that control fin movement in UAVs and missiles.