Aonix selected for Taranis UAV program

NUREMBERG, Germany, March 3 (UPI) -- Aonix announced it has been selected to support the British Taranis technology demonstrator program for next-generation unmanned aerial vehicles.

British defense technology company QinetiQ is the prime contractor to provide the Taranis program with the reasoning layer of the autonomy mission system. QinetiQ announced it has subcontracted Aonix for the company's PERC ultra virtual machine technologies to support the Taranis program.

British Ministry of Defense officials say Taranis is expected to be the largest UAV built in the United Kingdom as part of the strategic unmanned air vehicle experiment program. "The Taranis Reasoning Layer needs to run complex decision-making and optimization algorithms on an embedded processor," the release said.

After an extensive review, QinetiQ chose Aonix's PERC for its embedded processor and real-time operating system capabilities.

"We chose to develop the Taranis Reasoning Layer with Java due to the broad range of capabilities of that platform, but we needed PERC ultra to support practical deployment in a real-time, embedded environment," Peter Baynham, QinetiQ command and intelligence systems business managing director, said in a statement. "Support for our chosen architecture and ability to integrate with existing libraries were also key factors."