How it works
ARA’s offering joins the aircraft, onboard navigation and ground-control parts of an uncrewed mission. SKYMATE supplies programmable flight control, while SKYCONTROL handles mission planning, monitoring, configuration and camera feeds. The ARA408 adds selectable EO/IR or mapping payloads and the AiM onboard image-processing module for thermal filtering, object detection, tracking and video overlays.
The GPS-independent inspection work is a separate, documented development strand. ARA describes SLAM, which builds a map while estimating the aircraft’s position, together with multidirectional obstacle avoidance. Its June 2023 case reports tests in mine drifts 250 metres underground. These mechanisms explain how the inspection system can navigate without continuous GPS; they do not establish that every current ARA aircraft carries the same navigation package.