Wind River, world leader in delivering software for intelligent connected systems, has announced that Airbus Defence and Space, an Airbus Group company, relies on Wind River VxWorks 653 Platform for its long endurance tactical unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) "ATLANTE."

Known as the most important technological and industrial initiative in the Spanish unmanned air vehicle sector, ATLANTE was designed to carry out target identification, shoot correction, and damage evaluation operations, among other ISTAR missions (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance). It offers the capability of operating 24 hours a day, in any meteorological condition and does not require take-off/landing strips.

"We sought to create an UAV with fully automated take-off and landing capabilities, and the capacity to provide its operators with real-time information by performing surveillance and target acquisition over a large area," said Fernando Mijares, ATLANTE Chief Engineer at Airbus Defence and Space. "We chose Wind River VxWorks 653 knowing it would perfectly serve these hard real time and mission critical constraints given its proven track record of successful implementations in the UAV space."

Part of the Wind River product portfolio for trusted systems, VxWorks 653 is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platform for delivering safety-critical, integrated modular avionics (IMA) applications. It is compliant with ARINC 653, which implements ARINC 653 partitioning of applications. Specifically, VxWorks 653 powers the mission computer, ground communications and control station critical computers in the ATLANTE. In addition, it provides resource management and a partitioning environment that allows multiple independent applications of different criticality levels to run on a single target platform.

"Used in over 300 programs, by 185 customers and on 70 aircraft, VxWorks 653 is the world's leading ARINC 653-compliant IMA platform," said Alex Wilson, director of aerospace and defense at Wind River. "We are extremely proud to know that our technology has enabled the development of yet another revolutionary UAV, one that is considered to be the most important technological initiative in the Spanish unmanned air vehicle sector."

For more than three decades, Wind River has been a trusted advisor in the development of safety and mission-critical products. The company's reliable and secure software has served as a key technology for countless autonomous systems around the globe, including the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, Northrop Grumman X-47B, unmanned aircraft, CIRA's FTB-1 reusable unmanned spacecraft, AgustaWestland's Project Zero technology incubator, and the nEUROn Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle demonstrator, among others.