Honeywell tests organic air vehicle

GPS World, Sept, 2004

Honeywell of Plymouth, Minnesota, has completed flight testing of a new GPS-enabled organic air vehicle (OAV) designed to gather and transmit battlefield surveillance. Developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the OAV is a 29-inch-diameter iSTAR ducted fan vehicle controlled using micro-electric mechanical systems (MEMS) technology, and equipped with video cameras that relay information to a remote ground station video terminal.

GPS technologies provide position information and time-stamping capabilities and enable preset and real-time remote control navigation. "Organic" refers to deployment and autonomous use by the smallest operational field unit, probably a company (see GPS World, August 2004, page 40).

The OAV completed "urban terrain" flight tests at Fort Benning, Georgia. Honeywell also is developing a 13-inch diameter OAV for DARPA's Micro Air Vehicle Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration in December. The technology could become part of the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems program as the "hover and stare" Class I Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) System

2,000 TALINs. Honeywell also delivered its 2,000th Tactical Advanced Land Inertial Navigation (TALIN) system. TALIN provides position information when GPS is unavailable, in both low-cost military handheld GPS receivers and high-performance applications for precise positioning and targeting. The latter embeds an MPE-S SAASM 12-channel GPS receiver from Rockwell Collins.

Introduced in 1999, TALIN appears on several platforms, including U.S. Army heavy and medium combat vehicles. The 2,000th TALIN unit went to Daewoo in the Republic of Korea for an air defense weapons system.