Doubters, you get results! In response to commenters’ skepticism that a UAV without 80 percent of its wing can land safely, Rockwell Collins passes along this video of a recent Darpa-sponsored test:
It’s not that the unpiloted aircraft that the Army flies aren’t already tricked out. Some of them carry the latest surveillance systems and powerful missiles. But some companies at the Association of the U.S. Army convention in Washington D.C. figure that the drone fleet needs some upgrades.
The box above? That’s a guidance system to make sure that a malfunctioning drone can land safely on the spot that a unit directs it — essentially, something that makes an unmanned plane really independent of human control. There’s also radar gear to give drones a better line of sight down to the ground for airborne spying. Need cellular coverage in the middle of nowhere? Hook a few pods up to the bottom of a drone, send it aloft, and start tweeting again.
The grey box is the brainchild of Dave Vos, a senior director of unmanned systems for Rockwell Collins. Vos created a bunch of tech known as Automatic Supervisory Adaptive Control, sensors and navigators weighing between five and six pounds that tell a damaged drone not to worry about mechanical failure and land at a pre-determined coordinate. “There’s no human intervention,” he says.
Most drones aren’t really unmanned, just piloted remotely through controls by someone who isn’t in their cockpits. But those remote pilots likely can’t control their drones when something goes wrong — and the WikiLeaks document dump from Iraq showed that drones failed at an alarming rate during the war. Vos’ boxes are like a worst-case scenario autopilot.
To test it required seriously messing with the drones. “We blew off part of a wing — up to 80 percent of it,” Vos recalls fondly of one test. The pre-fed coordinates in the navigation unit got the drone back to where it needed to be. Obviously, if the engines go or a missile shoots the plane down, then Vos’ boxes aren’t going to be able to save the aircraft. But they’re geared to let the drone survive “single and multiple failures.”
Then there’s Northrup Grumman’s STARlite radar system, something it’s started sending to the Army since winning a contract in April 2008. When hooked up to a drone — it’s supposed to sit on the Army’s Grey Eagle, an armed drone supposedly on its way to Afghanistan this fall — STARlite fires two kinds of radar, one called synthetic aperture radar for persistent, 360-degree staring at a patch of ground, and another called a Ground Moving Target Indicator to track mobile targets.
That provides “a detailed look at a particular area,” says Joseph Parsley, a Northrup senior manager for drone tech, down to “minute details and characteristics of roads, vehicles, buildings,” with minimal atmospheric interference. The resultant imagery gets fed back to units on the ground who need to see what’s happening over the next ridge or on a patch of ground over a long period of time. It’s not yet in operation, but Parsley says it’s been tested on Army spy blimps; when the Grey Eagle flies, the drone should have the 64-pound STARlite on board.
But the troops likely to operate the Grey Eagle are also likely to face connectivity problems in the remote areas of Afghanistan. That’s why two affiliates of the Textron company, AAI and Overwatch, partnered with ViaSat to create what’s basically a set of flying cell towers. They call it Forward Airborne Secure Transmissions and Communications, or FASTCOM, and it looks like two pods on the belly of a Shadow drone. Put the drone overhead and the pods provide a secure mobile 3G cellular network over a given area.
“That makes a soldier really a sensor,” says Reid Rousselot, who works on FASTCOM, inside a mock-up of a tactical operations center on the convention floor, since soldiers can now provide their own data networks for transmitting information to each other. FASTCOM, which isn’t yet in the field, can get coverage to most Army systems — although Textron would prefer that troops use its SoldierEyes family of applications to send each other messages, maps and other information.
Just as long as the drone stays in the air, that is. Maybe Rousselot and Vos have something to discuss.
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