2025 Paris Air Show & IDS Denmark | Show report Topotek, a Beijing-based Chinese gimbal manufacturer, showcased an extensive portion of its portfolio of weight-optimised, multi-sensor gimbals in varying configurations at the air show. The company specialises in advanced stabilisation solutions tailored for aerial and defence applications, and aimed to highlight its works in advanced gimbal technologies. “The E40S48G12L30 is one of our largest gimbals – a high-performance quad-light pod equipped with 40x lossless zoom, a 48 MP fixed-focus camera, a 1280x1024 thermal imager with a 25 mm lens and a 3000 m laser rangefinder,” said Dr Junaid Haider of Topotek. “With so many uses across industries, this versatile system excels in search and rescue, precision farming, industrial inspections, border security and wildlife monitoring. Whether tracking endangered species, scanning crop health or inspecting remote infrastructure, its combination of long-range zoom, thermal vision and laser measurement capabilities deliver extensive and detailed visibility where ordinary methods fail.” The company’s gimbals are fully compatible with Pixhawk, QGroundControl (QGC) and ArduPilot, supporting MAVLink, Datalink, UDP and TCP/IP protocols, together with SBUS, PWM and UART control interfaces. “At 360 g, the EHP03G6S86D15 is highly suited to drone and eVTOL payload applications: a quad-sensor gimbal with 48 MP fixed-focus, 3x optical zoom, 640x512 thermal imaging, and a 1.5 km laser rangefinder – plus HDMI/network outputs for real-time streaming – all in a SWaP-optimised package.” Additionally, the company’s gimbal cameras are AI-powered to feature detailed tracking and monitoring capabilities. Those include supporting target recognition for people and cars (so long as they cover at minimum 32x32 pixels in any given image), as well as tracking objects from 16x16 to 256x256 pixels, handling occlusions of up to 2 s, tracking speeds up to 50 pixels/ frame and recognising up to 100 targets simultaneously. Parrot Group unveiled its CHUCK 3.0, a turnkey autonomy module for turning theoretically any aircraft platform into a functioning UAV. The system, built around an autopilot, includes flight sensors, comms and a multi-sensor gimbal. “We’ve developed micro-UAVs for the past 15 years, and wanted to condense all of our knowledge in AI, radio, optics and other disciplines into a single, plug-and-play module,” explained Chris Roberts of Parrot. Using CHUCK, as a modular and scalable solution, means an integration path of four months for most UAV suppliers. Roberts pointed toward countries such as Ukraine, which have hundreds of drone makers in need of highly capable autonomy solutions deliverable in scale and with short lead times, as potentially ideal customers for CHUCK. To that end, it integrates militarytype radios and anti-jamming and -spoofing capabilities for long-range stealth operations, as well as the aforementioned gimbal and sensors for optical navigation. “For comms, CHUCK has a frequencyhopping military grade radio called MARS, together with 5G and our LoRa radios,” Roberts added. “And for European sovereignty, there’re no components from China, and you don’t have to be connected to the cloud to use it. All processing is done 63 Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2025 Topotek’s SWaP-optimised gimbals feature target recognition for people and cars, as well as several other useful AI-powered capabilities Parrot’s CHUCK 3.0 modular, plug-and-play solution integrates an autopilot, navigation sensors, radios and more, to turn theoretically any flyable platform into an effective UAV
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mzk4