The Turkish defence industry is preparing the mini unmanned aerial vehicle ARIKUŞU, capable of landing and taking off on mobile land and sea vehicles, whose battery is automatically replaced without the need for the personnel to go out.
DASAL Aerospace Technologies, an ASELSAN and Altınay affiliate, has developed a series of products in different classes to meet the military and civilian UAV needs.
Designed for reconnaissance and surveillance missions, the mini UAV ARIKUŞU is capable of taking off and landing on mobile land and sea vehicles. Developed to perform special tasks, ARIKUŞU can perform critical tasks including surveillance, detection, recognition, and tracking functions, through the features it has such as image processing, artificial intelligence, and sensor fusion.
Onur Güzelmeriç, Director of Sales, Marketing and Business Development at DASAL, stated that the main duty of ARIKUŞU, which they exhibited at TEKNOFEST 2021, is to minimize the danger to the life of the personnel.
Explaining that there is a need for a fully automatic system to meet the surveillance and intelligence needs of personnel who go to the operation area or move from one point to another without leaving the vehicle through armoured or other vehicles, Güzelmeriç said, “We started our work on this subject last year and we made our first flight this year about 2 months ago.”
Sharing information about the operation concept of ARIKUŞU, Güzelmeriç stated that the system integrated into the land vehicles at 30-40 kilometres speed automatically opens its doors and creates a runway and thus enables the ARIKUŞU to be used, without the need for military personnel to go out. Güzelmeriç indicated that the integration of the system to sea vehicles is also planned in the future.
Emphasizing that ARIKUŞU performed a fully automatic landing on the runway with a QR code on its surface after fulfilling its surveillance and intelligence duties for 20-25 minutes, which depends on the weather conditions, Güzelmeriç made the following comments:
“Our duty does not end here because we have to fly again. There is no need for personnel to change the battery. There are one empty and five full special slots in the system. We transfer the battery that has been discharged following a task to the empty slot on the vehicle, rotate ARIKUŞU in a special system, insert the full battery, and enable it to return to duty in less than a minute. There are also smaller UAVs with fixed wings that fly longer. They are useful as well but since their wings are fixed, it is not easy for them to work with this type of armoured vehicles in these terrains. Even if it is a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing UAV with fixed wings), a 2-3 meter wingspan is needed to carry certain cameras. By fulfilling duties uninterruptedly with a small UAV, we are responding to a very serious need.”
Stating that they carried out their first test flights, Güzelmeriç said that they will continue the next process in coordination with the authorities with need. Güzelmeriç said, “Probably, our acceptance test flights will take place in the first half of 2022. Hopefully, the necessary work will continue after these flights.”