Northrop Grumman [NOC] on Monday said it has successfully demonstrated its airborne data gateway aboard an MQ-4C Triton unmanned aircraft system flying testbed to link various naval assets, including the F-35 fighter plane and DDG-51 Aegis-class destroyers, to create a common operating picture for distributed maritime operations.
For the interoperability demonstration, ground-based simulators were used to represent the F-35, destroyers, an E2-D Advanced Hawkeye battle management aircraft, and carrier strike groups. The gateway hosted on the Triton flying test bed shared sensor data from the simulated fifth-generation platforms. The demonstration, which occurred in October 2022, identified and classified potential threats from a “complex surface scenario of dark targets, the company said.
The airborne gateway was integrated with Triton’s radar and artificial intelligence-machine learning capabilities to enhance situational awareness across the platforms by taking advantage of sensors aboard the various platforms and assets.
Northrop Grumman has conducted a number of demonstrations showcasing its capabilities in seamlessly connecting the future battlespace across platforms and domains. More recently, the company and several partners demonstrated the use of a commercial 5G network with open standards to transmit data and video in a warfighting scenario. Last summer, the company worked with Cubic Corp.
to demonstrate a high-capacity backbone-enabled gateway solution to connect and process data across different systems.
“Our gateways provide and open, secure and resilient solution needed to enable information advantage for our customers,” Ben Davies, vice president and general manager, network information solutions at Northrop Grumman, said in a statement. “This powerful combination expands the mission sets of maritime platforms to deliver a seamlessly connected fleet, a critical step as the U.S. Navy achieves its naval operational architecture to enable distributed maritime operations.”