By Ann Roosevelt
The Army plans a major showcase of manned and unmanned systems next fall to showcase its efforts to build interoperable manned and unmanned systems, a top service official said.
“We’re going to have the single largest demonstration ever conducted of manned and unmanned systems,” said Tim Owings, deputy project manager, Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Army Program Executive Office for Aviation.
Some years ago the service set out to build “the most interoperable fleet of unmanned systems ever fielded,” he said in a recent roundtable.
The effort is built on open architecture protocols, the universal ground control station and a “universal” operator.
Col. Robert Sova, Army Training and Doctrine Capability Manager for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, said the universal ground control station allows the enlisted soldiers to operate the systems and to focus on training.
The demonstration of interoperable systems in the fall of fiscal year 2011 will include the AAI Corp. [TXT] Shadow system, Warrior systems, produced by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, and the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Hunter systems, as well as the small UAS systems such as the AeroVironment Raven.
The Army’s manned aircraft will be participating as well, Owings said. That would include the new Boeing [BA] AH-64 Block III Apache helicopter, and potentially the Bell Helicopter [TXT] OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter, as well.
“So from the standpoint of the complete end-to-end prove-out of interoperable systems, this will be, in our opinion, the largest demonstration ever conducted,” Owings said.
The demonstration is going to be first conducted at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. It is primarily an Army demonstration to showcase the work that we have done over the last several years in the areas of interoperability and manned/unmanned teaming.
“What you will see at the demonstration is really an unprecedented level of interoperability, where we will be tying systems together in terms of command and control, so that from our universal ground-control station you will see us hot-swap between Shadows, Hunters, Warriors,” he said. “You will see us push not only video into Apache Block III cockpits, but the Apache Block III to take limited command and control of our unmanned aircraft systems. Basically, [it’s] controlling the hunting dogs in front of the hunters.”
There will also be something new, taking the digital data link used on the Army’s small UAS and putting it in the larger systems as well.
“The reason we did it is, it allows all of these small hand controllers that we use for the small unmanned aircraft systems to now be used as remote receiving devices as well,” he said.
“We will have the ability to receive at the Raven controller the video from our Shadows, our Hunters and our Warriors,” Owings said. “But, perhaps more importantly, it also allows us the ability to do command and control of those sensors from those small hand controllers.”
The Army will be displaying and demonstrating all the work it has done over the past several years.