AVILUS

Since 2021, AVILUS has been developing the fully electric multicopter “Grille” (English: Cricket), which is tailored to the military evacuation of wounded soldiers. The range of around 50 km and the transport capacity of approximately 135 kg are sufficient to transport wounded combatants from areas near the frontlines to field hospitals (e.g., ROLE2). The UAV's mission is monitored from a mobile control room, the so-called Patient Evacuation Coordination Cell (PECC), which is integrated into the back of a truck. When developing the system, the focus lied on military requirements right from the beginning. This manifests e.g., in the structural concept: it takes two soldiers and 15 minutes to transition from a transportable to an operational state of the drone. Furthermore, the aircraft can be stored and transported on a standard trailer, which serves as a take-off and landing platform. The avionics were also selected according to military requirements and, in addition to jamming resilience, offer other important advantages such as connectivity to battle management systems. To keep the training effort for the remote crew as low as possible, we enable flight requests, flight planning, flight dispatch and monitoring within the battle management system. The UAV has been in flight testing since 2022.