SAN DIEGO, 25 Feb. 2010. Northrop Grumman Corp. (NYSE:NOC) announced that its the first in a new series of Bat unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) completed its first flight.
Configured with a 12-foot wingspan, the Bat-12 incorporates a highly-reliable Hirth engine as well as a low acoustic signature five-blade propeller. The new configuration increases the mission portfolio of Northrop Grumman's scalable Bat UAS product line.
Since acquiring the Bat product line from Swift Engineering in April 2009, Northrop Grumman is expanding the UAS family's flight operations and military utility for numerous tactical missions. During recent testing, the 12-foot and 10-foot wingspan Bat were each launched from an AAI Shadow UAS launcher and autonomously operated from a single ground control station before recovery via net. As a communications relay using Northrop Grumman's Software Defined Tactical Radio, Bat has also demonstrated its capacity to provide beyond line-of-sight tactical communications relay for ground forces in denied environments.
Recently, the Bat UAS has been integrated and tested with new payloads and systems including a T2 Delta dual payload micro-gimbal from Goodrich Corp.'s Cloud Cap Technology Inc., Sentient Vision Systems' Kestral real-time moving target indicator, and a short wave infrared camera from Goodrich. Payload integration and testing was expanded to include ImSAR's Nano-SAR-B fused with Cloud Cap's T2 gimbal in a cursor-on-target acquisition mode.
Bat offers real-time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, communications relay, and future capabilities in a modular system that is runway independent and fully autonomous.
