ASTRAEA
British UAV manufacturer
Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment (ASTRAEA) is a project to develop unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to fly in civil airspace. Both UK government agencies and companies such as AOS Group, BAE Systems, Qinetiq, Rolls-Royce plc, Cassidian, Cobham plc, EADS and Thales UK are involved. The project began in 2006.
Currently, UAVs can only operate in UK airspace under restricted conditions.
ParcAberporth has a centre dedicated to ASTRAEA. Permission has been sought for a permanent segregated airspace around ParcAberporth for testing UAVs over land.
Concerns about safety, privacy and noise were raised during consultative sessions.
Test Flights
Test flights were performed, between May and September 2012, over the Irish Sea. A Jetstream aircraft is being as a UAV and a Piper Seneca as an 'intruder' to test the sense and avoid systems.
In April 2013 the first unmanned flight over British airspace was successfully completed when BAE Systems flew a Jetstream 31 from Warton Aerodrome, on the Fylde near Preston to Inverness in Scotland. The aircraft, described as the "flying test bed" was controlled by a pilot at Warton using advanced sensors and on-board robotic systems.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “ASTRAEA” as british UAV manufacturer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 21, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q4654395. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2012 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “ASTRAEA” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.