News - Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International

New Bat Takes to the Air with Longer Wingspan

By: Brett Davis, Feb 26, 2010 9:44 AM

Northrop Grumman says a new variant of its Bat unmanned aircraft flew in January.

The Bat-12, which has a 12-foot wingspan, "increases the mission... more

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Northrop Grumman says a new variant of its Bat unmanned aircraft flew in January.

The Bat-12, which has a 12-foot wingspan, "increases the mission portfolio of Northrop Grumman's scalable Bat UAS product line," the company says. The new Bat also incorporates a Hirth engine and a five-bladed propeller with a low acoustic signature.

The company recently successfully tested the 12-foot and 10-foot wingspan Bats with an AAI Corp.-built Shadow UAS launcher. Bat has also demonstrated its capability as a communications relay using Northrop Grumman's Software Defined Tactical Radio.

Northrop Grumman is integrating and testing new payloads and systems with its Bat family, which was acquired from Swift Engineering last April. The Bat has been tested with a T2 Delta dual payload micro-gimbal from Goodrich Corp.'s Cloud Cap Technology Inc., Sentient Vision Systems' Kestral real-time moving target indicator and short wave infrared camera from Goodrich. In February, payload integration and testing was expanded to include ImSAR's Nano-SAR-B fused with Cloud Cap's T2 gimbal in a cursor-on-target acquisition mode.

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Northrop Grumman Global Hawk Aids Haiti Relief

By: Danielle Lucey, Feb 3, 2010 10:22 AM

Northrop Grumman, which has an exhibition chalet at the Singapore Airshow 2010, said in a press conference Wednesday that it has been flying a Block... more

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Northrop Grumman, which has an exhibition chalet at the Singapore Airshow 2010, said in a press conference Wednesday that it has been flying a Block 10 iteration of its Global Hawk over the last few weeks for the Haiti earthquake relief effort.

Edward Walby, director of business development for Northrop’s Global Hawk Systems division, said that the UAV was deployed from the Naval Air Station Patuxent River base in Maryland, which is monitored from the Beale Air Force Base in California, to fly 24-hour sorties in a diversion from its typical flight to the Middle East. Walby said that for every nine to 10 hours of imaging the Global Hawk performs, it takes roughly 500 images of the devastated country.

“You could provide that long time on station and immediately deploy it to the next station,” Walby said of the Global Hawk’s long-endurance capability.

The UAV is performing damage assessment using an electro-optic sensor and radar imagery that can determine building damage, road blockage and human activity. Walby said that despite the Global Hawk’s high elevation, it can show if a person is active, lying down potentially injured or likely dead. And at 60,000 feet, the Global Hawk was also able stay out of rescue airspace and coordinate some air traffic from above so that planes landing at the Port-au-Prince airport could be ensured of space on the ramp, said Walby.

“It works out very well in disasters when you have a lot of air traffic involved.”

In an example of other military alternatives to the Global Hawk the coming months, NASA will start using the unmanned system for hurricane and environmental monitoring research, taking samples of ozone and dropping temperature gradient devices into the ocean to see why tropical activity develops the way it does.

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Military Adapts Robotics Operation to Afghanistan

By: Brett Davis, Feb 2, 2010 12:41 PM

The shifting military focus from Iraq to Afghanistan is also shifting the way the military repairs its ground robots, says a U.S. Army project manager.

"The... more

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The shifting military focus from Iraq to Afghanistan is also shifting the way the military repairs its ground robots, says a U.S. Army project manager.

"The static operation in Iraq, bring the robots to use and we'll fix them, doesn't work in Afghanistan," said Jeff Jaczkowski, deputy program manager of the Robotic Systems Joint Project Office at U.S. Army Tank-automotive & Armaments Command (TACOM).

Jaczkowski spoke at the opening day of AUVSI's Unmanned Systems Program Review 2010, which covered ground systems. The program continues Wednesday and Thursday on air and maritime systems, respectively.

Afghanistan's infrastructure is in worse shape than Iraq's, so it's easier to bring the repair people to the robots. To do that, the RS JPO has embedded repair teams with troops and has set up mobile repair teams that can visit Forward Operating Bases.

Logistically, that means that some user-replaceable parts are now stored with the units, where soldiers can do things like fix robot treads or wheels.

More robots are headed to Afghanistan as they leave Iraq; last summer there were 500 there, now there are more than 1,250, he said. One of the newest is a variant of the iRobot Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV), called the Mini EOD (explosive ordnance disposal). Dubbed the "Devil Pup" by the Marine Corps, a few dozen are in place now, with about 250 due in theater by this summer, he said.

Looking ahead, the Army is studying its future robot needs. Jon Bornstein, the chief of the Robotics Systems Division at the Army Research Laboratory, said ARL is looking at a variety of behaviors and systems, including ways to give robots greater autonomy to operate in areas with “both good guys, bad guys and noncombatants.”

The robots will also need to be more self-aware. For instance, a robot could run a diagnostic program and be able to tell its human teammates if it's "sick and can't do something ... That is a common theme; how to make the robot function like an average human does," he said.

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EADS to Sign MOU With Singapore Universities

By: Danielle Lucey, Feb 2, 2010 5:00 AM

Representatives from EADS Innovation Works Singapore revealed at the Singapore Airshow 2010 that they are signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU)... more

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Representatives from EADS Innovation Works Singapore revealed at the Singapore Airshow 2010 that they are signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) Wednesday morning with two Singapore universities in a move to further its ties to the burgeoning technology hub.

Under the agreement, both the National University of Singapore and Nanyung Technological University’s various engineering departments will perform research for EADS’ use. In exchange for the information, the company will sponsor the schools’ Ph.D. students and then offer them employment for about one or two years after they graduate, says Alain Dupuis, research team leader for the company.

One of the nine research areas Dupuis says that the universities will focus on is real-time embedded systems, which will study the capabilities of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and polarimetric SAR, both of which add to UAV’s situational awareness.

EADS opened its first Asia research team two years ago in Singapore, which now has expanded to more than 20 workers. Dupuis credits the Asia-Pacific nation’s developed knowledge base with the company’s decision to focus on Singapore’s scientific market.

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NATO Affiliate Defines Classifications of UAVs, System Employment

By: Danielle Lucey, Feb 1, 2010 6:22 PM

In a move that might eventually formalize classifications of unmanned aerial systems, Air Cdre. Jan van Hoof of the NATO-affiliated Joint Air Power... more

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In a move that might eventually formalize classifications of unmanned aerial systems, Air Cdre. Jan van Hoof of the NATO-affiliated Joint Air Power Competence Centre revealed 31 Jan. at AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems Asia-Pacific that the center recently agreed upon categoric standardizations of different types of UAS. Specifying exactly what constitutes, for example, a mini UAV could increase communication effectiveness among nations regardless of which system it happens to have contracted, said van Hoof.

The center, which acts more like a think tank than part of NATO’s chain of command, are also seeking to come up with a standard for how different kinds of UAS are employed, van Hoof said, with types of use broken down into categories such as mission planning or emergency planning.

Once the Joint Air Power Competence Centre defines a standard, like they have for UAS classifications, it is passed onto the NATO Standardisation Agency where it might be formalized.

In order to increase the acceptable uses of UAS, van Hoof said that standardization in the unmanned community needs to be up to par with manned aircraft.

Echoing the need for standardization in the community, conference moderator Jeffrey Goldfinger of L-3 Advanced Systems gave an impromptu briefing on standardization of unmanned aerial systems by the ASTM International F38 technical committee on robotic air systems. Chairman of the committee, Goldfinger’s sentiment that standardization would bring unmanned air systems to a new level of acceptance was echoed on the second day of the conference by MITRE Corp.’s Andrew Lacher, who is also on a UAS standardization committee.

“We know how to build reliable aircraft,” he said. “We just need the policy decisions to do it right.” Lacher expressed hope that within two years, the United States would be further along with its UAS regulations.

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Fiscal 2011 Defense Budget Boosts Unmanned Systems

By: Brett Davis, Feb 1, 2010 4:14 PM

The Obama Administration on 1 Feb. unveiled a $708 billion fiscal 2011 defense budget that calls for more unmanned aircraft flights over Iraq and Afghanistan... more

Fiscal 2011 DOD budget

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The Obama Administration on 1 Feb. unveiled a $708 billion fiscal 2011 defense budget that calls for more unmanned aircraft flights over Iraq and Afghanistan and buys more UAS, while eliminating part of the U.S. Army's former Future Combat Systems.

"FY 2011 investment spending will continue the expanded use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in war zones. The request of $2.2 billion supports the plan to increase Predator-Class CAPs [Combat Air Patrols] from the current 37 to 65 by FY 2013," according to budget documents.

The budget includes $25.1 billion for shipbuilding, including for two Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), which make extensive use of unmanned systems as part of their mission packages for various functions, such as hunting mines or submarines.

It also includes $3.2 billion for Brigade Combat Team modernization, the new name for the Future Combat Systems program, which has been steadily scaling back in recent years. The BCT now includes iRobot's Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV) and Honeywell's Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) in its first increment. A later increment will include Lockheed Martin's Armed Robotic Vehicle-Light (ARV-L). Other variants of the ARV-L, and Northrop Grumman's Fire Scout unmanned helicopter, have now been dropped from the program.

UAS purchases in the budget include nearly $1.9 billion for MQ-9 Reapers for the U.S. Air Force and Sky Warrior UAS for the Army. That includes 12 Reapers and three Sky Warriors (also known as the Extended Range/Multipurpose (ERMP)) as part of Overseas Contingency Operation funding, and 36 Reapers and 26 ERMPs in the regular budget.

The budget calls for increasing the number of UAVs “so that we can increase the combat air patrols from 37 to 65,” Department of Defense Comptroller Robert F. Hale said at a Pentagon briefing.  “We will max production of the Reaper – the most advanced version of the Predator. It’s at 24 in 2010; it will go to 36 in 2011, and then up to 48."

The budget also includes $1.5 billion for four RQ-4 Global Hawk aircraft, which includes $737 million for procurement and $781 million for continued research, development, test and evaluation, including the system development and demonstration for the U.S. Navy's Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) variant.

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Evergreen, Elbit Partner to fly Skylark over Haiti

By: Brett Davis, Jan 29, 2010 11:09 AM

Evergreen Unmanned Systems of McMinnville, Ore., says it partnered with Elbit Systems to fly a Skylark I LE unmanned aircraft over Haiti to help discover... more

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Evergreen Unmanned Systems of McMinnville, Ore., says it partnered with Elbit Systems to fly a Skylark I LE unmanned aircraft over Haiti to help discover the condition of remote orphanages there.

The team flew missions from the mountains of Haiti at 5,200 feet altitude, near Port-au-Prince.

"Contact with many Haitian orphanages has still not been established because of the remote locations of the facilities," the company says. "An incredible need still remains for humanitarian support in the area."

The team was able to fly the Skylark for most of two days, earlier this week, although it stopped after U.S. Southern Command began flying other unmanned aircraft in the region. The work was done as part of Evergreen's other disaster relief work in Haiti, and was paid for by the company.

"This pioneering effort between Evergreen and Elbit to respond to the urgent need of the Haitian people has proven that such technology can provide a life saving humanitarian service," the company says. "Never before has a commercial operator of unmanned systems accomplished what was achieved this week by the Evergreen-Elbit team. "

The Elbit Systems Skylark I LE, which is carried by an individual person, can launch without use of a runway, search for survivors, document infrastructure damage and identify blocked roads. It weights 12.1 pounds and has and an operating time of up to three hours.

Evergreen has supported humanitarian efforts worldwide for 50 years, primarily by providing aviation support for international relief projects.

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Army Trims Brigade Combat Team Modernization Effort Further

By: Brett Davis, Jan 14, 2010 5:17 PM

What remains of the U.S. Army's former Future Combat Systems is getting smaller, as the service plans to remove two unmanned ground vehicles and one... more

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What remains of the U.S. Army's former Future Combat Systems is getting smaller, as the service plans to remove two unmanned ground vehicles and one air vehicle from the program.

The Brigade Combat Team Modernization (BCTM) program, as FCS is now known, is removing two variants of Lockheed Martin's Multifunctional Utility/Logistics and Equipment (MULE) vehicle, one devoted to transport, one to fighting mines. The program is also removing the Class IV UAV, a role filled by Northrop Grumman's Fire Scout unmanned helicopter.

The move comes as the Army prepares its fiscal 2011 budget, due to be revealed in coming weeks. Lockheed Martin says the cuts won’t make a large difference.

“The termination order does not affect, and work continues on, the Armed Robotic Vehicle (ARV) variant of the MULE, which accounts for approximately 90 percent of total anticipated MULE production program," a company statement says.   
 
“Lockheed Martin is obviously disappointed with the decision to discontinue development of the Transport and Countermine MULE vehicles but appreciates the Army’s recognition of the performance maturity of the program to date and the Army’s confidence in our ability to deliver the enhanced combat capability the ARV MULE variant brings to the future warfighter.”

The ARV MULE is scheduled for a critical design review in 2010, and the company also plans to build a prototype vehicle.

Fire Scout does not depend on BCTM for its future, as it's already in production for the U.S. Navy, but the company said it’s disappointed in the action.

“Northrop Grumman believes that warfighters have a strong requirement for VUASs [vertical unmanned aerial systems] to meet their needs in the areas of reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition; communications relay; signal intelligence; and resupply,” the company said in a statement.

“Army Fire Scout will demonstrate these capabilities in this month's Army Expeditionary Warfare Experiment at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Northrop Grumman remains dedicated to providing this unique capability to the soldier in the field. We are committed to meeting the VUAS needs of the Army and the U.S. Navy with this exemplary autonomous rotary wing unmanned aerial system.”

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Beale sends Global Hawk to aid in Haiti earthquake relief efforts

By: Alysa Reich, Jan 14, 2010 4:42 PM

by Tech. Sgt. Luke Johnson
Beale Air Force Base 9th Reconnaissance Wing

1/14/2010 - BEALE AIR FORCE BASE -- The 12th Reconnaissance Squadron launched... more

KRCA-TV (NBC) Coverage

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by Tech. Sgt. Luke Johnson
Beale Air Force Base 9th Reconnaissance Wing

1/14/2010 - BEALE AIR FORCE BASE -- The 12th Reconnaissance Squadron launched a Block 10, RQ-4 Global Hawk, unmanned aerial vehicle from Beale Air Force Base Jan. 13 to assist with the humanitarian aid mission in Haiti after the country suffered a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12.

The squadron received the short notice mission from United States Southern Command to provide imagery to assist in the continuing relief efforts.

The Global Hawk, a high-altitude, long-endurance aircraft, is equipped with an integrated sensor suite to include synthetic aperture radar, electro-optical and medium-wave infrared sensors.

"(The imagery) will help to characterize what regions of the country were hit hardest by the earthquake, and we can provide that imagery to our intelligence unit on base," said Lt. Col. Mark Lozier, operations officer with the 12th RS. "They'll exploit the imagery and send it back to the requesting end user."

Not only will the Global Hawk's advanced imagery provide an overall assessment of the damages, it will also help expeditiously direct aircrew flying into Haiti to deliver crucial supplies to those affected by the earthquake.

"In effect, you get to look at what we know is damaged, and what we know is still serviceable,"  said Lt. Col. Lozier. "We can take a look at airfields to assess, right now, whether or not we will be able to get airlift in there with aid. We don't have to wait for a ground team to get in there and make on site decisions."

The long range and endurance of the Global Hawk will allow flexibility in meeting mission requirements during the ongoing relief mission in Haiti.

"One of the ideal aspects of the Global Hawk for this purpose is it's high-altitude; we can stay airborne 27 to 28 hours," said Lt. Col. Lozier. "We will be using most of that time to stay on station over in Haiti during most of daylight hours to image most of everything that we can with the highest fidelity."

This is not the first time the Global Hawk has been used to assist in a humanitarian crisis, back in 2007 the imagery from the Global Hawk was used to assist California firefighters battling blazes in Southern California.

"Normally, we are supporting wartime efforts 24/7, it's nice to be able to use this jet in some other aspect other than our normal routine mission that we are all used to," said Lt. Col. Lozier. "It's nice to be able to use this jet in a way that is helping in a crisis."

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NIST Taps CyPhy Works for Infrastructure Inspection using UAS

By: Brett Davis, Dec 22, 2009 5:55 PM

CyPhy Works, the new company established by iRobot co-founded Helen Greiner, is among 20 companies to receive funding under the National Institute of... more

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CyPhy Works, the new company established by iRobot co-founded Helen Greiner, is among 20 companies to receive funding under the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Technology Innovation Program (TIP).

The Framingham, Mass.-based company will develop the technologies required to create small, hovering, unmanned aircraft for inspecting and monitoring large-scale civil infrastructure elements such as bridges and dams. The award from NIST will total $2.4 million over the next three years to support direct project costs, Greiner says.

“Robots have the potential to revolutionize many industries” says Greiner, the CEO of the new company. “This award is indication of the commercial potential of CyPhy Works’ existing technologies. It will allow us to develop the additional technologies required for civil infrastructure inspection.”

The TIP awards are aimed at developing technology and materials for modernizing infrastructure, and totaled $71 million. CyPhy Works is the only award explicitly based on unmanned systems technology.

“President Obama is leading an effort to drive economic growth and solve national problems by deploying a 21st Century economy,” says U.S. Commerce Deputy Secretary Dennis Hightower. “These new projects will develop new technology and material that will play a critical role in modernizing infrastructure and developing the manufacturing sector across the country.”

A number of research efforts are under way to develop "smart" sensor technologies to improve the monitoring of large, critical structures like bridges and dams, but few offer significant improvement over the current state of the practice that relies on visual inspection, CyPhy Works says.

The company, working with the Georgia Institute of Technology Research Corp., is attempting to develop a novel and potentially revolutionary inspection system based on small, unmanned, hovering robots fitted with video cameras and other
sensors. The proposed UAS would slowly move along the sides or undersides of bridges and similar structures while relaying close-up, high-fidelity images and other data to engineers for robotic assisted inspection (RAI).

Because the robots could work without the need to shut down bridge lanes or to rig safety harnesses and other equipment for human inspectors, they would greatly increase both the speed and safety of bridge and dam inspections, the company says.

For particularly critical or at-risk structures, inspectors could use a more advanced technology, “autonomous robotic monitoring” (ARM), where one or more dedicated inspection robots would be stationed at the structure and make periodic flights to detect potentially dangerous changes.

“Both approaches will require major advances in the current state of the art of small UAVs to allow them to fly and hover safely in potentially gusty winds for long periods with precise positioning,” CyPhy Works says.

For instance,

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UNMANNED SYSTEMS NEWS

New Bat Takes to the Air with Longer Wingspan

Northrop Grumman Global Hawk Aids Haiti Relief

Military Adapts Robotics Operation to Afghanistan

EADS to Sign MOU With Singapore Universities

NATO Affiliate Defines Classifications of UAVs, System Employment

Fiscal 2011 Defense Budget Boosts Unmanned Systems

Evergreen, Elbit Partner to fly Skylark over Haiti

Army Trims Brigade Combat Team Modernization Effort Further

Beale sends Global Hawk to aid in Haiti earthquake relief efforts

NIST Taps CyPhy Works for Infrastructure Inspection using UAS