A Sophisticated Low Cost Avionics for Expendable Unmanned Aircraft

"For years Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have failed to deliver on their promise to revolutionize the remote-sensing industry. Their potential for small size and low cost has been offset by the lack of sufficient avionics hardware and softwareintegration resulting in expensive vehicles that are difficult to maintain, and suffer from high rates of attrition. The recent introduction of the Motorola MPC555 automotive processor, with its integrated memory and extensive onboard peripherals, coupledwith the latest GPS technology provides the opportunity to finally realize powerful yet inexpensive UAV avionics systems in very small footprints. Cloud Cap Technology has capitalized on these advances with the development of Piccolo, a full-featured yetaffordable end user programmable avionics development platform. The next step, the PiccoloLT, is a low cost derivative that trades hardware flexibility and expandability for further reductions in size and cost. PiccoloLT will provide UAV developers with ahighly integrated development platform that is small, reliable and inexpensive enough to use on an expendable airplane. Phase I and II development will result in an extremely inexpensive avionics system which is software compatible with our moresophisticated Piccolo system. The primary market niche for PiccoloLT is developers of expendable small unmanned aircraft; in particular the Navy to whom we hope to sell thousands of systems.However Pi