By Carlo Munoz
The Navy is working with its counterparts at Army aviation to create a new wide-area surveillance capability for the ground service’s fleet of aerostats and unmanned aerial vehicles, according to a recent contract award issued by the Navy’s air warfare center.
The $10.4 million contract awarded to Arlington, Va.-based Logos Technologies will cover “systems integration and testing support” of the Army’s Lightweight Expeditionary Airborne Persistent Surveillance-Overseas Contingency Operations (LEAPS-OCO) system and transition that work into the remainder of the service’s unmanned aircraft, a Jan. 26 award notice issued by the Naval Air Warfare Center’s aircraft division states.
The LEAPS-OCO system has already been fielded on board the Army’s low-altitude Shadow UAS, and is being used to “detect unfriendly personnel, under day and night conditions, involved in potential attacks on the [forward operating bases], emplacement of improvised explosive devices and any other terrorist activity,” the Navy notice states.
The LEAPS-OCO system is currently deployed on board the ground service’s Shadow tactical UAS aircraft in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations across the globe.
The results from that integration and testing support for the Army sensor program will feed into the center’s work toward “design, development, production, fielding, operation and sustainment” of a new Wide-Area Persistent Surveillance (WASP) system.
The initiative is tied to Naval Air Warfare Command’s “special surveillance programs” effort run out of NAS Partuxent River, Md. At press time, a NAVAIR spokesman had not replied to queries regarding the details of the contract, or the nature of the Army-Navy collaboration on the effort.
The two-year development time line for the WASP, covered by the Jan. 26 contract, will focus on development of enhanced data storage technologies for wide-area surveillance, as well as force protection and “false alarm mitigation” applications for U.S. forces engaged in combat operations.
The data storage aspect of the program, as planned, will “provide improved tracking of dismounted personnel in and around a forward operating base,” the award notice states. To provide ground forces with a false alarm mitigation capability, company officials will look to leverage “demonstrated technologies to reduce false positives and reduce the danger to U.S. and coalition personnel,” the notice states.
Aside from actual WASP sensor development, testing and operation, officials from Logos Technologies will also be responsible for configuration of the sensor to work with the Persistent Ground Surveillance System (PGSS), as well as “the design, documentation and building of interfaces that allow the…aerostat-mounted sensor and ground support segments to interface with [the] Persistent Threat Detection System (PTSD),” it adds.
Logos Technology was awarded the contract via a single-source competition, based on the company’s past involvement in the program. The firm was awarded the first and second phase of the development effort when it was being conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, under its small business innovation initiative.
The current contract with NAVAIR represents the third phase of the WASP development.