New Autonomous British UAV - Taranis

BAe has announced that they have just started production of the prototype for a new autonomous UAV. The Taranis.

Very stealthy looking, completely autonoumous, this machine looks the business. It is originally intended for surveillance purposes, but there is a view to add a weapons package in the future.

The development costs for this are extremely cheap, coming in at £124 million.

www.baesystems.com...

BAE Systems, though its Autonomous Systems and Future Capability business unit based in Lancashire, UK, is a leader in the development of Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) demonstrators to enhance military air future capability in the UK.

Rapid engineering techniques and an agile approach to project management has enabled Autonomous Systems and Future Capability to produce a development programme which has resulted in six different platforms flying in the last three years.

Intelligent autonomy, payload and platform systems integration and networked capability all contribute to the ability of our products and services to deliver against operational need – robustly and reliably.
Key focus areas are:

* the development of sovereign UCAV ability for the UK armed forces
* the development of fully autonomous utility UAV systems

Sovereign UCAV ability for the UK

BAE Systems is the industry lead and prime contractor for a project to develop a world-class UAV Technology Demonstrator called Taranis.

This £124m four year programme is part of the UK Government’s Strategic Unmanned Air Vehicle Experiment (SUAVE) and will result in a UCAV demonstrator with fully integrated autonomous systems and low observable features.

The project is being led from within the Autonomous Systems and Future Capability business unit at Warton, Lancashire with support from other BAE Systems teams in the UK and in Australia. Industry partners on this MoD led project include Rolls-Royce; QinetiQ and Smiths Aerospace. The Taranis Technology Demonstrator Programme is aimed at helping inform the UK MoD of the potential of UAVs within the armed forces mix.

[edit on 11/11/07 by stumason]

Looks like something someone would claim was a UFO in a polaroid that they scanned onto the board here..

UAV tests can account for an awful lot of "UFO" sightings in Northern England over the past decade or more.

The UK may seem like the USA's lapdog and technologically inferior, but we do have some pretty nice things going on here too.

I do know that US Navy personnel present at the sea trials of the Type-45 were absolutley astounded by what it can do. Especially considering their own next generation destroyers have a question mark hanging over their funding.

Is Great Britain not the second biggest spending per head of population after the US when it comes to military R&D.

Sure I read that somewhere but I'd imagine the evidence to prove that is fairly tricky to come by.

Originally posted by maintainright
Is Great Britain not the second biggest spending per head of population after the US when it comes to military R&D.

You're probably right on that as even though China and Russia come ahead in Military spending, their populations obviously far exceed the UK's (which is in 4th place) according to here.

Damn I absolutely wish I could be where I used to live. Could have had some chance of seeing some 'U.F.O's' next year.