86 Insight | UAVs While the Pathfinder flies on one battery pack, the Starling Hub contains two more, for mechanically swapping one into the UAV when it lands upon the 2.1 m2 landing surface. The swap lasts 30 s, and landing safety is ensured using the UAV’s onboard payload sensor and embedded computer vision (which recognises a QR code visible in both day and night conditions). “Another interesting point of how we’ve engineered this UAV concerns its wingtip motors,” Ruiz continues. “Those give us more yaw stability, and being so lowprofile, our V-tail is about 30° shallower than that of most V-tail drones. “That combines with the motor arrangement to give us super smooth turns, and hence really balanced, stable circling in, say, loitering situations where you’re tracking targeted trespassers near critical infrastructure, or circling a mountain or plant to capture a really precise digital twin of it.” For environmental protection, either wing and the tail each feature a servolockable hinge, which lock to maintain the flight profile during missions, and unlock so that the Hub’s electromechanical hatch doors can lift them into their upright folded position after landing (slightly reminiscent of the Grumman F-4F Wildcat). The wings and tail are spring-loaded to fall back down into flight configuration when not pushed upwards by the doors. The Hub integrates a climate-controlled environment, as well as multiple temperature and humidity sensors (together with cellular or satcom telemetry links upon request) to assess the likely health of the UAV within, as well as four cameras for direct visual monitoring atop and around the station. Additionally, a weather station tracks local temperature, humidity, precipitation and wind activity. For end-users interested in edge processing of routine survey data, the Starling Hub may also integrate an NVidia Jetson Orin Nano Super module. Summary In addition to these various examples of unusual approaches to aircraft engineering and operations, it is hard not to take note of the ongoing fanfare around urban air taxi systems. Well over a hundred of these companies are now in operation, and whether they are gathering seed capital, actively manufacturing or undergoing difficulties, each is notably presenting aircraft somewhat different in their architecture. Some, like EHang and Volocopter, have essentially built large multi-rotors, with cockpits in place of the usual avionics hub. Others, like Joby, Archer and Wisk are utilising tiltrotors on fixed-wing systems, while a few go even further, such as Dufour Aerospace who have successfully engineered tiltwing UAVs (Issue 52) and plan to build crewed eVTOLs in the future using lessons learned from that solution. Whether the face of passenger aviation will become a mixture of these crafts of different shapes and sizes alongside standard commercial airliners remains to be seen. But the bounty of engineering knowledge gained from these companies’ relentless activities, together with that being accumulated across the UAV world, will doubtless spur continued blooms of imagination across aerospace engineering for the rest of the 21st century. August/September 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Starling’s Pathfinder VTOL-transitioning UAV has folding wings so that it can fit into the Starling Hub drone-in-a-box station (Image courtesy of Starling Systems)
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