Sharly Ben Chetrit, Exec .VP Marketing IAI, On The Future Of UAV
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עברית (Hebrew)
The Wright Brothers flew a plane for the first time in 1903 and made history. Israel, with its unmanned aerial vehicles, is on the verge of a revolution that deserves to go down in history as well.
Sharly Ben Chetrit talked at the AUS&r 2015 conference on September 7th on the direction of the UAV industry. The first UAV, forty years ago, weighed 500 kgs, whereas today’s large Super Heron weighs several tons – and it is not even the largest unmanned vehicle. But not only size has changed, but the purpose of the vehicles. If at first UAVs were developed to fly higher and have longer endurance, in recent years development turned to producing all-flying intelligence machines. Today’s UAVs contain various systems to supply a good and accurate situation report. Also, most of the developments in the field were of military-aerial platforms, but lately we’ve begun developing unmanned vehicles fit for land or sea and many drones aren’t even for military use, but for citizens. Ben Shetrit estimates that UAVs will become even more common than they are today, which requires other developments to accompany the industry such as pin-sized cameras to be installed on the unmanned platform.
In the military UAV field, development is much like raising a child and today the industry is at a stage which is much like a teenager: Sometime fooling around and making mistakes but is soon to get much better. However, there are still some unclear stages in the future of UAV development. Ben Shetrit claims that Sci-Fi movies are really a vision for UAVs. Technologies that have once appeared as science fiction are now reality, and so technologies that appear in Sci-Fi today can become reality tomorrow. The day is not far, says, when passenger planes will fly without a pilot.
In the past UAVs could be obtained only by extremely advanced air forces. Today some armies have unmanned aerial vehicles as well, and in the future there might even be a personal drone for every soldier, much like a personal weapon, that could, perhaps, alert the soldier of any possible threats in his surroundings. In the future there might be packs or swarms of drones, it will be possible to fly a large number of them for search and rescue missions where the different drones could communicate with each other. Such a mission offers a faster and more complete integral situation report, allowing authorities to work more efficiently and quickly.
