ReconRobotics Rolls Out Larger Scout, Aims for UAS Market Expansion

By Danielle Lucey

23 October 2012

At this week’s Association of the U.S. Army meeting in Washington, D.C., ReconRobotics unveiled a prototype of Recon Scout XC, the big brother of its Recon Scout and Throwbot product line. 



The platform is based on the same chassis as a Recon Scout XT, but with its larger wheel design can go over 4-inch obstacles. 



ReconRobotics has been working on this platform for about 10 months, says Bob Dedic, the company’s military sales manager, after the company got feedback from its military users that they’d like a more all-terrain capability. The Recon Scout XC, which stands for cross-country, will likely be available in the early part of next year.



ReconRobotics has also changed its operator control unit, integrating the antennas onto the system, so they are no longer part of an OCU kit that needs some assembly. 



The company is also branching out of ground robots and is creating a landing system for small UAVs. The company’s new technology grew out of purchasing local Minnesota company Xollai, a company grown out of a University of St. Thomas project. 



The system uses three LED lights on an UAV that are detected and decoded by an algorithm to gain altitude, range and orientation data. The company is working on making the vision-based UAS lander available by the third quarter of 2013.