At the Forum on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles hosted by the Department of Transportation’s Research and Special Programs Administration held on May 25th, MLB (http://www.spyplanes.com) flew its BAT-3 mini-UAV over Interstate I-95 near Springfield, Virginia.

Despite persistent moderate rain and a ceiling of 1000 feet, the 15 lb aircraft delivered live video to the groundstation and snapped several high-resolution still images during the flight. The aircraft was hand-launched in a field near the freeway and tasked to fly between two prescribed waypoints at an altitude of 500 feet. The ground crew maintained visual contact throughout the flight, ready to change the autonomous flight path or assume manual control if necessary.

A report in the Cincinnati Enquirer quotes Mark McCord, an Ohio State professor who attended the conference, as saying "It was cool and interesting, since it was working well during pretty bad weather." Larry Harman, the Director of the GeoGraphics Laboratory at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts said, “From my perspective, it proved exactly the contribution that mini-UAVs can make.”

The BAT-3 has a wingspan of six feet, a top speed of 50 mph, and can fly for six hours at its cruising speed of 35 mph. It can carry 1 lb of payload in addition to the video camera and transmitter. The system has been delivered to several organizations, including UC-Berkeley and NASA Ames Research Center, for diverse missions such as sensor dispersion, persistent surveillance, and crop monitoring.