By Geoff Fein
Raytheon [RTN] is continuing its close work with the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense on developing a common ground control system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), according to a company official.
Raytheon built the tactical control system the Navy uses to fly Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] Fire Scout vertical takeoff UAV. That control system was built to a full Standardization Agreement 4586 (STANAG 4586)–which outlines standards for UAV control systems to enable them to be interoperable. Getting the STANAG 4586 means the technology complies with NATO standards, Mark Bigham, vice president Raytheon information intelligence systems, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“With the system that flies Fire Scout, we also showed the government how you can modify that to fly the new STUAS (Small Tactical Unmanned Air System) offering we put forward, fly BAMS (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance), Global Hawk, Predator, and Reaper, which would significantly reduce the overall cost of sustainment and development for those platforms,” he said.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems builds both the Predator and Reaper UAV.
Northrop Grumman builds Global Hawk and is developing BAMS.
Additionally, the government owns the Fire Scout control system, Bigham added.
Getting companies to provide the government ownership of ground control systems has been an issue, he noted.
“In the UAV world, that has been a big problem. A lot of the ground systems were owned by the platform primes and they used a proprietary interface between the air and the ground to kind of hold the government hostage,” Bigham said. “With our system, the government owns those interfaces, they have complete control of them and they can dictate and set the terms and the upgrade path without being held hostage by a platform prime.”
According to Bigham, the Navy is testing the controller in its labs.
“It is the most rigorously tested UAV command and control system on the planet, period. It has gone through the full-up Navy MILSPEC testing and it has been run through the ringer so it has gone through a lot of testing,” he said. “They have provided copies to the Army and have offered it to the Air Force.”
Under the tactical control system program, the Navy wanted to have a common control system for all unmanned things, Bigham said.
“It’s intentionally designed so that one system can fly multiple different types of unmanned airplanes, it can also drive unmanned boats and drive unmanned underwater vehicles,” he said.
Moving toward a common controller for all things unmanned is inevitable, Bigham said.
“I think you will see a convergence toward a common system,” he said. “Right now, the current approach where you have a unique system fielded with every UAV that is unsustainable. It absolutely can’t happen…[it’s] unaffordable. The logistics trail and the training trail is just logistically unsupportable.”
As more and more unmanned systems are deployed, the services are going to consolidate to fewer numbers of controls mechanisms that will be owned by the government.
“Right now we are talking in the neighborhood of thousands of unmanned systems operating in the environment. There are going to be millions of them operating in the environment within a decade,” Bigham said. “You can’t have millions of different types of control systems because it is unmanageable and unsustainable.”