A fast progress is made in the evolution of weapons and military defense systems, whereby when it comes to training pilots in air-to-air combat scenarios or calibrating, testing, and evaluating defense systems against threats, emerges the need to have affordable and cost-effective systems such as target drones in which the destruction of the target by direct impact is acceptable due to their low cost.

The target drones can be easily configured to simulate various types of air defense threats, including attack aircraft, various types of missiles, and the latest dynamic asymmetric threats, such as high-speed UAS/UAV systems, both armed and unarmed. There are also target drones for, in the same way, simulated threats of land or naval kinds as anti-ship cruise missiles.

Veronte Autopilot 1x and UAT target drones

Veronte Autopilot 1x permits the integration of advanced functionalities, providing a high grade of reliability, operational safety, and performance while maintaining a low cost. This last-generation autopilot has fully autonomous flight performance with a high degree of accuracy, from launch to recovery (in case the system is recoverable). The system architecture permits to control multiple target drones with a single operator and a control station for performing a wide variety of synchronized maneuvers.

Veronte permits the integration of a wide range of payloads on target drones, providing a high degree of system and operation automation and considerably increasing the system capacity. The typical payloads that can be configured are: oil smoke, identification friend or foe (IFF), increased active and passive radar, electronic countermeasures, chaff, flares, infrared cameras, etc.

Veronte also embeds sensors for operating at high speed and acceleration ranges (gyroscopes, analog and digital accelerometers, magnetometers, integrated GPS, dynamic pressure sensors, etc.). It can be installed for controlling systems with speeds above 1.000 km/h and supporting continued maneuvers with accelerations up to 16 g. The system also supports a wide range of external sensors, and they can be installed for specific applications.

Some advanced functionalities supported by Veronte for target drones are:

• Waypoint Route.
• Maintain speed, altitude, and direction or any system variable.
• Sea Skimming.
• Custom flight phases on request.
• Follow Me operations.
• Mission movement with reference to the control station.
• Landing on mobile platforms.
• Definition of no-go areas.
• Limitation on safe flight zones.
• etc.

In conclusion, target drones combined with Veronte Autopilot 1x provide high performance, keeping low costs of acquisition and operation and being the perfect choice for training, evaluation, and testing of advanced air defenses with respect to the operational needs worldwide.