54 unmanned systems
inside
April/May 2017
INFRASTRUCTURE COMMUNICATIONS
Photos courtesy of Inmarsat and AnsuR Technologies
Low Earth Orbiting (LEO)
and geosynchronous (GEO)
satellites will be used to support
unmanned systems.
Inmarsat was created to serve
the maritime community.
without the need for cellular. The data/video
run from the drone through the existing links
to the drone's controller and then through ei-
ther an encoder or a portable terminal. The
setup enables operators to quickly send infor-
mation from remote locations or disaster zones
where other connections are not available. In
fact, AT&T;, which has been tapped to build the
FirstNet Public Safety Broadband Network to
support first responders, has chosen Inmarsat
to be part of its team.
"Technology has evolved immensely over the
last couple of years," said Holdsworth, which
makes it possible to "pass much higher resolu-
tion video and stills imagery through very small
bandwidths from the UAV."
Inmarsat is working on how it can best as-
sist during emergencies. One of its technol-
ogy partners, a Norwegian firm called AnsuR
Technologies, has developed UAS software
for specific projects with the United Nations,
a system that was used during a sequence of
volcanic eruptions in Indonesia.
"We put a system in Indonesia to allow them
to have 20 regions supported by medium
sized drones—the kind of drone that can f ly
for about an hour and a half. And so they were
putting these up with a complete system allow-
ing them to geotag all of the information that
was sent to an operational center," Holdsworth
told Inside Unmanned Systems. "We even f lew
one of the drones into one of the volcanoes, I
think to have kind of an investigation."
" SATELLITE LITERALLY HAS
1,000 TIMES MORE SPECTRUM
AVAILABLE TO IT, AND IT'S
AVAILABLE ON A GLOBAL
BASIS, NATURALLY, BECAUSE
IT'S IN SPACE."
Nathan Myhrvold, co-founder, Intellectual Ventures,
speaking to Geekwire