Skip to content
PROTOWORKS DEFENCE

NOMINAL

Request a briefing
AUTONOMY·ISR OVERWATCH
34.05°S 18.42°E · 14:22:07Z/UAS-04
AUTONOMY // ISR-OVERWATCH

Autonomous overwatch.
Cued, locked, held
from the air.

An airframe flies itself — waypoint patrol, loiter and return-to-launch on industry-standard autopilots — slews its EO/IR gimbal to a cued ground contact and holds the lock as the contact moves, and answers line-of-sight over metre-scale 3D terrain. Persistent aerial eyes on the picture your ground units already share, tasked by dossier and accountable like any other unit.

Request a briefingBack to live ops

SORTIE CONSOLE

UAS-04
LEGWP 3 / 4
STATELOITER · 120 m
BATT0.42
RTLBATT < 0.20

SORTIE LEDGER · UAS-04

RTL · BATT < 0.20
T+10:37
HANDOFF · GND-2 → UAS-04
T+08:22
ON-STATION · AOI-04
T+02:38
LAUNCH · PAD-1
T+00:00
AIRFRAMES 4
ON STATION 1
COVERAGE 3 AOI
HANDOFFS 2
LINK 3/4
01 / FRAME — AN AIRFRAME ENTERS AS A UNIT

An airframe is just another authenticated unit.

A UAS joins the picture exactly as a ground unit does. Its identity, its credential and its live telemetry are governed like any ground unit’s — verified and reflected in the shared picture by Force, which holds the unit and its live telemetry. What only an aerial unit adds begins once the airframe is airborne: it flies itself, acquires and holds a cued ground contact from above, and answers line-of-sight in three dimensions.

  • Affiliation and echelon symbology resolve on the airframe as on any unit — see Force.

  • One picture, not a drone console — the airframe is tasked and watched alongside the ground units it flies over.

  • Once airborne, everything it does — each mode change, each acquired contact — lands back in that same shared picture.

AIRFRAME · UAS-04

AIRBORNE

What the airframe adds

FLIGHTautonomous flight — patrol, loiter, return-to-launch, geofence
ACQUIREslew-to-cue EO/IR track-lock onto a cued ground contact
OVERWATCH3D viewshed, line-of-sight and dead-ground over the terrain

Inherited from the platform

UNITidentity, credential and live telemetry, governed by Force

BLUEPRINT · AIRFRAME

AIRFRAME · HEXA-6 · EXPLODED VIEW

SCROLL — DISASSEMBLY DRIVES WITH THE PAGE

DWG 04-A · FRAME PACK

02 / AUTONOMY — PATROL · LOITER · RTL

Autonomy the platform tasks, never owns.

Flight stays with the airframe. Industry-standard autopilots fly autonomous waypoint patrol, loiter-on-AOI and return-to-launch; the platform’s job is to task the mission by dossier and watch it by telemetry — never to fly the aircraft.

  • Patrol legs follow the area of operations already drawn on the live picture — no separate mission-planning map.

  • Mode changes and low-battery return-to-launch show instantly on the airframe’s own track.

  • The flight boundary is enforced on the airframe itself, not reconstructed on the ground.

FLIGHT PLAN · AUTONOMOUS

AUTONOMOUS

MISSIONa waypoint, loiter and return-to-launch plan tasked to the airframe
GEOFENCEan enforced flight boundary — any breach raises an immediate alert
BRIDGEthe airframe’s live position and status flow straight into the picture
RTLlow battery brings the airframe home automatically, no operator action

PATROL

LOITER

RTL

BLUEPRINT · DOCK CYCLE

DOCK CYCLE · LAUNCH / RECOVER

DWG 04-B · BAY PACK

03 / ACQUIRE — SLEW-TO-CUE TRACK-LOCK

Acquire the cued contact. Hold it from the air.

Acquisition begins with a cue: a ground or surface contact flagged inside an AOI. The airframe is dispatched, closes from standoff, and its EO/IR gimbal slews to the cued bearing — no hand-flying. A centroid track-lock then holds the contact in frame as it moves across the ground. What the airframe contributes is the airborne angle: a stabilised optical line onto a moving contact, held while it relays a confirmed track.

SLEW-TO-CUE

  • The tip-and-cue loop that raises the cue originates in OSINT.

  • The cue itself steers the gimbal, so the first look is already on the contact.

  • Loiter / orbit and pattern-of-life analytics over the held track live in Graph.

  • EO/IR optics — focal length, thermal band, stabilisation — are specified in Sensors.

04 / OVERWATCH — 3D FLYOVER · LOS

What can the airframe see — and where is the mask.

Overhead overwatch runs on a high-fidelity 3D world: metre-scale terrain, areas of operations and units placed on the relief, with a camera that flies straight to any point from the 2D picture. The terrain analytics — viewshed, line-of-sight, slope, dead-ground — are precisely the questions a drone’s sensor footprint poses: what can this airframe see from here, and where is the terrain mask it must re-task to close.

  • The live camera view feeds straight back as a new area to task — observe and re-task without leaving the terrain view.

  • Viewshed and line-of-sight are computed from the airframe’s altitude over real relief, not from a flat map.

  • Terrain can run from a hosted service or fully on your own infrastructure.

VIEWSHED · 3D TERRAIN

SCHEMATIC

UAS-04 · ALT

VISIBLE

DEAD-GROUND

TERRAINhigh-fidelity world terrain, metre-scale relief beneath the area of operations
DEEP-LINKcamera flies straight to any point selected on the 2D picture
05 / RESPOND — SENSOR AND RECIPIENT

Both a sensor and a recipient.

An airframe is two things on one link. As a sensor it streams its position and EO/IR track down into the live picture. As a recipient it takes a tasking back up — a new AOI, a fresh cue, a re-task in flight — and turns onto it without landing. The round-trip closes in flight: cue up, gimbal slews, a confirmed track comes back down.

  • The full loop — up and back — closes in seconds.

  • Every device event resolves into one clear unit status in Force.

  • Reliable delivery over degraded links rides the Vehicles transport stack.

IN-FLIGHT ROUND-TRIP

ONE LINK

Uplink · airframe as recipient

Re-task AOIFresh cueSlew order

UAS-04

Downlink · airframe as sensor

PositionEO/IR trackConfirm
UNIT STATUSunit status handled in Force
DELIVERYresilient delivery over contested links handled in Vehicles
06 / CONTRIBUTE — AERIAL TRACK ON THE COP

A drone track is a moving blue-force contact.

The airframe’s distinct contribution to the common operating picture is a moving contact from above. Its position and the contacts it acquires join the blue-force picture as Cursor-on-Target, so a field element on ATAK or WinTAK sees the airframe and its EO/IR track as live tracks on the same map — not as a report to be read later.

  • How that track is published out as CoT / SensorThings — see Graph.

  • Affiliation and echelon symbology on the track — see Force.

AERIAL CONTACT · ON THE COP

CoT

AIRFRAMEmoving contact
COMMON PICTUREone live track
ATAK-1ATAK-2WinTAK

The same aerial track resolves identically on the platform map and every field client — one contact, three handhelds.

ENGAGEMENT

Put an airframe in the loop.

Same identity, same picture — now with eyes overhead. Talk to our team about a flyover walkthrough, an autonomy evaluation over your AO, or putting an aerial track onto your existing operations room.

Request a briefingBack to live ops