UAVs | Insight As Kyle Miller, director at Censys Tech explains, “The Sentaero 5 and everything before it was essentially a single sensor for a single hour. However, the Sentaero aircraft have been developed continuously for eight years now, and the Sentaero 6 features similar autopilot and C2 tech as the 5, but the overall aircraft is updated to provide multi-sensor and multi-hour operations. “To that end, the Sentaero has been enlarged to around double the size of the Sentaero 5, to carry a payload bay that can integrate both RGB cameras and Lidars, with a fully composite structure, a bigger battery, bigger everything! We serve a lot of transportation and energy utility customers, who’d contributed to the Sentaero 5 having 20% of all active BVLOS waivers in the US. So, we really wanted to build on that with the Sentaero 6 with more flight time, multi-sensor data collection and higher certifiability.” One especially significant change has been the integration of an ASTMcertifiable parachute, which will enable Censys and its customers to obtain waivers for flying over areas with dense population and moving vehicles consistent with cities, and its plans include surveys over major urban centres such as Manhattan and Miami. “But before we start going over major metro areas, there’s a lot of real estate outside of the urban hubs themselves where we can fly now, for use-cases like road inspections, public safety and utility monitoring,” Miller adds. The UAV achieves up to two-to-four hours of flight endurance on its 27-36 Ah modular battery packs, with the energy storage and flight time changing depending on mission and payload requirements. VTOL is enabled through four twin boom-mounted VTOL motors and a pusher rear propeller enabling forward flight. While the Sentaero 5 was a tiltrotor, the company came to find over time that the tilt-servos’ added points of potential mechanical failure were not worth the aerodynamic efficiency advantages of tiltrotors over the relative simplicity of fixed VTOL motors. It additionally reports that the single, large pusher prop is able to provide more efficient propulsion than four smaller props tilted horizontally. “And as well as that improving our endurance and our lifespan between maintenance, maximising our comms range out to 100 miles was really thanks to Elsight,” Miller adds. “We’ve been an integrator of the Elsight Halo platform for many years, which has unlocked all the ranges we claim. We always maintain C2, even in areas of sparse connectivity; we still have a radio on the UAV for when users are truly in an LTE wasteland, and Silvus is our choice for direct radio links. “It’s still a modular aircraft intended for open configurability, and having the same airframe every time helps us manufacture at scale, but we also tailor the aircraft around a common set of components. If users need the Halo LTE plus Silvus, we can do it; if they need detect-and-avoid in the front, we can do it; if they need more endurance, we can swap something out for an extra battery. We’ve done all sorts of permutations over the years, and it’s now very open with the Sentaero 6.” Resident applications As with any resident uncrewed surveying product, drone-in-a-box solutions represent a long-lasting and cost-effective means of repeatably surveying fixed infrastructure. Installing enclosed stations near remote dams, rail facilities and the like, for recharging UAVs while protecting them from the elements, saves human personnel from having to drive out and launch inspection missions themselves. It additionally saves companies from conducting very long-distance UAV flights just to inspect a single point at the end of a 2-3 hour journey. However, such small, batterypowered, multi-rotor-type solutions cannot provide enough survey range for owners of lengthier or wider-spread fixed assets, such as power lines or pipelines. Permanently installing a UAV station for launch, recovery and charging every 10 km would prohibitively drive up the cost of investment and maintenance. Instead, Starling in the US has combined its Starling Hub drone-in-a-box station with its Pathfinder UAV, which is a VTOL-transitioning fixed-wing aircraft, possessing folding wings and a folding tail that enable it to be stowed compactly inside the aforementioned docking station, making for a more capable and convenient resident UAS than prospective customers might typically be used to. “Being a fixed-wing drone-in-a-box allows it to fly with three times the range and endurance that a conventional multicopter drone-in-a-box could achieve, purely because generating lift passively on its 1650 mm wingspan allows it to fly much longer – up to 2.5 hours depending on mission conditions, plus 30-40 minutes of maximum hover time,” says Diego Ruiz, lead drone operator. “We have several swappable payloads – not quick release yet but we’re working on that – and we use the Cube Orange+ as our autopilot to enable open-source programming, GCSs and so on, whether for end-users’ testing or commercial operations.” 85 Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2025 Drone-in-a-box solutions represent a long-lasting and cost-effective means of repeatedly surveying fixed infrastructure
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