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Aviation History
2004
2004-09 - 2004.PDF
LU! tional UCAR will be built. The programme will then transition to the US Army in 2009 in preparation for a decision on develop ment. "The first operational UCARs could be fielded in 2012," says Woodbury. At the heart of the UCAR concept is technology enabling autonomous opera tion and collaborative execution by teams of unmanned and manned aircraft. Autonomous collaboration means the unmanned rotorcraft can operate indepen dently of human control, while co-operat ing with other UCARs and manned aircraft to accomplish the mission. In prior attempts at manned/unmanned teaming, the workload in controlling the unmanned vehicles "consumed" the human crew, turning the manned aircraft into a dedicated command and control (C2) platform. Autonomous collaboration, the Phase 2 simulations showed, allows the manned aircraft to command the UCARs and also do its own mission. "The manned aircraft is not taken out of the fight," says Woodbury. "Autonomy, team-based inter action, verbal interface and distributed command and control lead to workload reduction." Compared with the DARPA/US Air Force/US Navy Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems programme, UCAR takes vehicle autonomy to the next level, says Woodbury. Left to their own devices, the UCARs will co-operate in the same way as manned aircraft, he says. "Manned air craft overlap their sensors and weapons, cover each other and relay communica tions. A team of unmanned vehicles brings the same benefits," he adds. According to Northrop Grumman, autonomy enables engagement options such as "protect self", in which the UCAR will avoid or engage threats to itself; "pro tect team", where it will engage threats to any UCAR and sacrifice itself to protect the manned aircraft; and "protect friendlies", in which the vehicle will engage threats to friendly forces. The air mission commander - the co pilot/gunner in the front seat of a Boeing AH-64D Apache in the Phase 2 simulations - interacts with the unmanned rotorcraft not as an individual but as a team. "The UCARs nominate a team lead to act as the focal point for interaction with the manned aircraft," says Woodbury. The team lead can change as the mission unfolds, as was demonstrated in Phase 2. "If an aircraft had to go back, it seamlessly passed the role to another." Other members of the team take the lead in other functions, including interfacing with external information systems and making the data available to the team. UCARs will take information from the Multi-sensor Command and Control Aircraft (MC2A) or the Global Information Grid. "They can also push information back into the common operating picture, and that is powerful," says Greg Zwernemann, Northrop Grumman programme director. In Phase 2, by linking its UCAR and MC2A simulations, the company was able pass radar data from the manned surveillance aircraft to the unmanned rotorcraft team. Woodbury says team-based interaction allows the human commander to work with the unmanned rotorcraft in the same way as with another pilot: planning the mission, setting the constraints and rules of engagement, and parcelling out the top- level tasks. In the air, the commander supervises the UCARs, taking the weapon release decisions, while monitoring his own sensors and employing his own weapons. Voice command Phase 2 simulations showed the benefits of verbal interaction with the unmanned rotorcraft using voice commands and spo ken responses. "The commander talks to the UCAR; the UCAR talks back," says Woodbury. "The commander will tell the UCAR to fly to Area Red, do a recce, do not fire unless fired on, report back at a specific time, and stay within this airspace. The UCAR will find and identify a target, pass the information back to the human, replan Intermesh- ing rotor (Northrop Grumman, top) is pitted against compound helicopter (Lockheed Martin, bottom) the mission, get a decision from the human, and execute." The commander is always in the decision loop, but does not have to approve every action the team takes. If a UCAR picks up a threat the rules of engagement say to avoid, the team will replan the mission to achieve the objective and send the new plan to the commander for approval. "The commander has X amount of time to review and approve the plan or it is implicitly approved," says Woodbury. "The human pilot is going to get busy and the UCAR will not hover, looking for something to do." In Phase 2, as part of its workload-man agement system, Lockheed Martin demon strated "negotiated intervention", the UCARs negotiating with the manned air craft so that high-priority alerts took prece dence over lower-priority messages. "We demonstrated tactile-vest alerting," says programme director Dan Rice. "The opera tor gets frequency, intensity and direction ality cues that improve situational aware ness and indicate which UCAR has an alert and how important it is," he adds. To achieve the goals of finding concealed and camouflaged targets and differentiating between combatants and non-combatants, the UCAR carries five different sensors, including millimetre-wave radar for syn- www.flightinternational.com FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 12-18 OCTOBER 2004 37
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