In my recent
post on the European MALE/UCAV unmanned aircraft landscape I mentioned that UCAV was where the smart money is going, not chasing General Atomics with a Predator
clone and BAE were actually well positioned to exploit much of the primary research that is being funded by the UK.
In the UK, the
ASTRAEA (Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment) programme for example. This was a collaborative effort between BAE, EADS Cassidian, Thals and AOS. Thales created the sense and avoid architecture, EADS Cassidian the communication systems and AOS the autonomous decision making software.
Cobham are also part of ASTRAEA and have just released this video of an autonomous air to air refuelling project.
Now that is some clever sh*t