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20 Mar 19. Defence partners with SYPAQ to innovate battlefield logistics unmanned aerial system for army. The Australian Army in partnership with the Defence Innovation Hub has awarded SYPAQ an innovation contract to develop and demonstrate a next generation battlefield logistics small unmanned aircraft system (UAS). The Australian Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced on 12 March that the Australian Army in January 2019 signed a one-year innovation contract with SYPAQ Systems to develop and explore the technology of the Corvo Precision Payload Delivery System (PPDS). The Corvo PPDS is a low-cost, disposable UAS optimised for the covert delivery of small volume payloads and has been implemented to improve the effectiveness of resupplying forward combat units, a Defence spokesperson told Jane’s. (Source: IHS Jane’s)
20 Mar 19. Here are some of the tactical drones the USMC wants in 2020. The Corps is pumping more money into its fleet of small tactical drones than it has in the past two years combined, according to budget documents. In fiscal year 2020, the Corps is planning to drop nearly $34.7m dollars on tactical drones ― that’s more than double the past two years combined of roughly $14m, Navy budget request documents detail. That pot of money will be invested into the next generation of group 1 and group 2 drones that will vary in distances and endurances and will aid the Corps at tactical levels from the battalion level down to the squad. The Corps’ current fleet of tactical drones consist of the RQ-12 Wasp, RQ-11 Raven, RQ-20 Puma and a number of vertical lift quadcopters like the Instant Eye.
“They continue to be planned as the current solutions for Group 1 and Group 2 capability needs while both Navy and Marine Corps finalize the transition of revised requirements to address Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Capability Set via a new Capability Development Document (CDD),” the fiscal 2020 Navy budget document reads.
The Corps says it’s now looking at capabilities-based platforms in lieu of specific drone aircraft as it prepares to modernize its small tactical drone fleet with the latest technology and enhancements.
Those capabilities include drones that are short range/short endurance, medium range/medium endurance and long range/long endurance. The revised capabilities needs shall “incorporate unique mission kits, mission payloads, air vehicle enhancements, and modifications,” the budget document reads. Ranges and endurance levels for the revised tactical drone needs were not outlined in the budget document, but the Corps’ group 1 and 2 drone fleet generally have flight endurance ranges of 60 minutes to 2.5 hours. The small Instant Eye quadcopter drones dished out to the rifle squads only weigh about a pound and have a shorter range and a roughly 30 minute flight endurance.
So what’s the Corps buying with its $34m request?
About $7.4m is slated for 190 of the next generation short range vertical take-off and landing, or VTOL, drones. Though the Corps says the actual quantity of the drones listed in the budget request is notional at this point and will be based on fleet needs.
These drones “will provide dispersed Marine Corps units (Companies, Platoons, and Squads) an organic capability to operate in combat zones with significant vertical obstructions such as urban, jungle, and rugged terrains,” the budget request says.
Another $12.9m will go toward 40 short range/short endurance drones, formerly known as the RQ-12 Wasp. The budget request also noted that this capability will include a VTOL variant in fiscal year 2020.
And $13.9m will procure 42 long range/long endurance drones, formerly known as the RQ-20B Puma, which will have various enhancements to include a new camera/sensor. Finally, just under $1m dollars is slated for the Single Operator Man-Portable Ground Control System/Target Handoff System. The ground control system will increase battlefield situational awareness while reducing the manpower needed to operate tactical drones. (Source: Defense News Early Bird/Marine Times)
19 Mar 19. What can bomb disposal robots learn from a house-cleaning cousin? The best robots are like toddlers, who through great difficulty reveal the complexity of everyday tasks. Consider, today, the kPAM robot from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The robot is an arm with sensors attached. The task is picking up objects it has never seen before and then putting them away correctly. It’s a weirdly captivating process, and one worth watching for any company looking to develop robots for military use. While my mind went immediately to future scenes of a robot reracking rifles or tidying up a barracks, the promise of kPAM is less about a specific task than it is about how the robot is able to identify, manipulate and store encountered objects. kPAM stands for “Keypoint Affordance Manipulation,” and builds on earlier MIT research about mapping newly seen objects. Once the robot has mapped the points it needs to know for an object, in this case mugs, it can pick up and put down similar objects. For a new mug, that means finding the top, bottom and the handle.
Consider, for a moment, what a robot needs to know to pick up a shoe. There’s an opening, an orientation and tremendous variation in all the little details for the sides. Trained on a set of shoes including boots and slippers, kPAM was unable to pick up high heels. After adding a couple pairs of heels to the training set, the neural network was able to adapt its schema and handle heels, too.
Picture a robot based on this technology that’s sent to clean up the aftermath of an explosion. If trained well, the robot will be able to recognize a range of inert scraps and set them aside into safe piles. One reason to send a robot in after an explosion is to see if there are secondary devices left about, meant for first responders. A robot trained on an extensive library of IED forms may not get it right every time, but it stands a good chance of identifying hazards and leaving them for trained professionals to detonate or dismantle.
The use cases for a robot that has figured out how to recognize and manipulate new but familiar objects in the wild are seemingly endless.
MIT’s next step for kPAM is more generalizable tasks at home, like unloading a dishwasher or wiping down the counters of a kitchen. Adapting the technology to military missions is likely not a high priority, but the technology is relevant enough that anyone making robots for the Pentagon should consider if it can improve their product. (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
18 Mar 19. HAPSMobile Hawk 30 to Start Flight Tests Soon. A secretive joint venture between SoftBank and U.S. aerospace company AeroVironment is poised to launch an experimental solar-powered drone to deliver connectivity for 5G and the Internet of Things.
The Hawk 30 will have a curved “flying wing” design similar to a series of high-altitude solar drones that AeroVironment made for NASA twenty years ago. Filings with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission suggest the new Hawk will have 10 electric engines and an operational altitude of over 20 kilometers.
According to a Space Act Agreement [PDF] signed with NASA in November, the prototype drone could take to the air for the first time at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California very soon. The initial agreement with NASA covers a series of flight tests over the next three months, up to an altitude of 3 kilometers.
AeroVironment did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
AeroVironment is no stranger to high altitude, lightweight aircraft. Beginning in 1997, the company built three solar- and fuel cell-powered drones under NASA’s Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology program.
Its final drone for NASA was the Helios Prototype, an elegant flying wing wider than a 747 but weighing less than just one of the jumbo jet’s 18 landing wheels, thanks to its composite material construction. The Helios still holds the altitude record for horizontal flight by a winged aircraft, reaching nearly 30 kilometers back in 2001.
However, the Helios brought NASA’s solar drone research to a sudden end in 2003, when it broke up in high winds during a test flight in Hawaii.
A 2004 report into that crash [PDF] concluded that “this class of vehicle is orders of magnitude more complex than it appears but that the AeroVironment/NASA technical team had identified and solved the toughest technical problems… An adequate knowledge base now exists to design, develop, and deploy operational high altitude, long endurance (HALE) systems.”
AeroVironment built yet another prototype HALE drone, called Global Observer, for the Pentagon in 2010, to carry communications and surveillance payloads. That program also ended in a crash, the following year.
These problems with HALE aircraft did not dissuade Facebook and Google from attempting to develop their own high altitude, solar-powered drones. Both were seeking new ways to bring Internet access to remote communities in under-developed countries around the world. Google bought a company called Titan Aerospace in 2014, and carried out numerous tests of a 5G system called SkyBender at Spaceport America in 2016. Its parent company, Alphabet, eventually grounded the drones in 2017 to focus on Loon, which is now an Alphabet subsidiary delivering commercial Internet service from high-altitude balloons. Facebook also wanted to test its enormous, stratospheric Aquila drones at the Spaceport, but shelved its plans last year after fragile prototypes were damaged on landing. Now AeroVironment is ready to try once more. In January 2018, Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank and AeroVironment formed a joint venture called HAPSMobile to develop a solar-powered HALE drone for commercial operations. HAPS is an acronym standing for high altitude, pseudo-satellite.
“For many years, we have fully understood the incredible value HALE unmanned aircraft platforms could deliver to countless organizations and millions of people around the world through remote sensing and last mile, next generation IoT connectivity,” said Wahid Nawabi, CEO of AeroVironment, at the time.
Since then, HAPSMobile has largely operated in stealth mode, with no public presence and a website that simply says “Coming Soon.” However, SEC filings show the new company has a budget of US $76.5m to design, build, and test the Hawk 30, including high altitude and long duration flights.
A presentation for AeroVironment investors [PDF] last June provided images and more details of the drone. A graphic shows the Hawk circling over a wide area at an altitude of 20 kilometers, with a single aircraft providing coverage equivalent to 1,800 traditional cell towers. The Hawk can be controlled manually, or can autonomously navigate a pre-planned route.
Of course, the aircraft is only one component of any future stratospheric Internet system. Google and Facebook had experimented with millimeter-wave and laser connectivity for their drones, and AeroVironment has made several experimental filings for tests in millimeter wave and other radio bands with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in connection with the Hawk 30.
Although none detail the Hawk’s intended communications payload, those filings do confirm that AeroVironment will be testing the drone in California, near the Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, and also on the small island of Lanai in Hawaii. “The tests will address integrating the transceivers at different altitudes in the solar environment,” reads one filing [PDF].
AeroVironment is paying NASA nearly $800,000 to supervise and provide ground support for the upcoming low altitude tests, which are scheduled to continue until the end of June. If those are successful, the company will go higher in its next round.
“The project envisions testing in varied environments, including significantly higher altitudes. AeroVironment will return to the Commission to seek the necessary authorizations relating to higher altitudes,” the company told the FCC.
Despite Google and Facebook withdrawing from the Internet drone race, the Hawk 30 still faces some serious rivals. Boeing subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences has an extremely similar looking aircraft called Odysseus, while Airbus is building its own HALE Internet drone, Zephyr.
Only time will tell whether any of them can overcome the curse of previous HALE aircraft, and establish a permanent Internet presence in the stratosphere. (Source: UAS VISION/IEEE Spectrum)
18 Mar 19. NATO to receive first Northrop surveillance drone, years late. NATO is to receive the first of five Northrop Grumman high-altitude drones in the third quarter after years of delays, giving the alliance its own spy drones for the first time, the German government told lawmakers. Thomas Silberhorn, state secretary in the German Defence Ministry, said the NATO Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) drone would be delivered to an air base in Sigonella, Italy, followed by four additional systems, including drones and ground stations built by Airbus, later in the year.
NATO plans to use the aircraft, a derivative of Northrop’s Global Hawk drone, to carry out missions ranging from protection of ground troops to border control and counter-terrorism. The drones will be able to fly for up to 30 hours at a time in all weather, providing near real-time surveillance data.
Northrop first won the contract for the AGS system from NATO in May, 2012, with delivery of the first aircraft slated for 52 months later. However, technical issues and flight test delays have delayed the programme, Silberhorn said.
Andrej Hunko, a member of the radical Left opposition party, called for Germany to scrap its participation in the programme, warning of spiralling costs and the risk that it could escalate the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
“The drones are closely linked to a new form of warfare,” he said. “They stand for an arms race that will see existing surveillance and spy systems replaced with new platforms.”
Silberhorn, in a previously unreported response to a parliamentary query from Hunko, said NATO had capped the cost of the programme at 1.3bn euros ($1.47bn) in 2007.
Germany, which is funding about a third of system, scrapped plans to buy its own Global Hawk drones amid spiralling costs and certification problems, and is now negotiating with Northrop to buy several of its newer model Triton surveillance drones.
Fifteen NATO countries, led by the United States, will pay for the AGS system, but all 29 alliance nations are due to participate in its long-term support.
Germany has sent 76 soldiers to Sigonella to operate the surveillance system and analyse its findings, Silberhorn said. He said a total of 132 German soldiers would eventually be assigned to AGS, of whom 122 would be stationed in Sigonella. NATO officials had no immediate comment on the programme’s status or whether Northrop faced penalties for the delayed delivery. No comment was available from Northrop. (Source: Reuters)
18 Mar 19. US, India collaborating on air-launched drone. The U.S. and India are working on development of a small, air-launched unmanned system that could be launched from cargo aircraft, according to Pentagon acquisition head Ellen Lord. The systems are part of a broader technology effort known as the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative, or DTTI, which seeks opportunities for co-production and development of military technologies between the two countries. Lord highlighted the drone project during a roundtable with reporters on March 15, a day after she hosted a delegation from India to discuss DTTI programs.
The UAV project — a collaboration between the Air Force Research Laboratory and India’s Defence Research and Development Organization — is a recent addition to the DTTI slate. The two organizations intend to write a technical planning document next month and then sign that plan during a meeting in New Delhi, which Lord will attend, tentatively planned for late September.
Lord declined to say if the program draws specifically from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Gremlins program, which aims to launch and recover reusable drone swarms using manned airborne aircraft. However, she did indicate the systems could likely launch from aircraft operated by both nations, specifically the C-130J and C-17.
That program contains “potential” for Indian industry to take part in co-development of the system, which would have three targeted uses: humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, “cross-border operations,” and cave and tunnel inspection, Lord said. She added that the program could be “an efficient, cost-effective way to provide additional capability to the war fighter.”
Another DTTI program under development is a lightweight small arms technology project, which could reduce combined weapons and ammunition weight by about 40 percent. (That project involves U.S. industrial firm Textron Systems, which Lord led before joining the Pentagon; she clarified she does not take part in any specific discussions about that project aside from its broad involvement as part of the DTTI portfolio.)
“This is an area where there is co-development, as well as co-production opportunity, and that’s really what we’re interested in — technologies where the U.S. has brought them to a certain level and there’s an appetite for more investment, and for whatever reason we’re not able to get at that [in] the U.S. right now,” Lord said about that project.
Other long-gestating DTTI projects, such as India’s desire to procure the EMALS carrier launch technology, remain in rough stasis, although Lord expressed hope the September meeting could set hard timetables for moving forward in that area.
Indian bureaucracy has long entangled both the Pentagon and the American defense industry, and the DTTI program has certainly moved more slowly than was envisioned when it was launched by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in 2012.
But Lord expressed optimism that the effort has finally turned a corner, thanks in part to Ajay Kumar, the secretary for defense production in the Indian Ministry of Defence. Kumar, Lord said, has been “very key” in getting the projects to move beyond just repeated meetings on the same topics — what Lord said was previously “death by PowerPoint.”
“What is different now is there’s been a lot of discussion and a lot of exchanges, [and] Dr. Kumar and I are saying we need to focus on deliverables with specific dates and really document what the objectives and the potential outcomes of the project are going to be,” she said, again noting that her September visit to India should coincide with putting a number of real deadlines and developmental milestones on the table.
The inclusion of industry trade groups, including two major groups based in India, has also helped get buy-in from Indian commercial enterprises, she added. (Source: glstrade.com/Defense News)
15 Mar 19. Russia Deploys 5 Eleron UAVs to Tajikistan. Servicemen of Russia’s 201st military base in Tajikistan have received advanced Eleron drones to form a battalion of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), the press office of the Central Military District said in a statement circulated on Wednesday.
“Five newest Eleron systems have arrived for the Russian military base in Tajikistan to form a battalion of unmanned aerial vehicles,” the statement says.
In accordance with the combat training plans, the crews are learning to operate the new hardware and get information with the help of UAV models already in service. The new unit is designated to boost the military base’s capabilities for conducting reconnaissance and adjusting artillery and armored units’ fire.
The Eleron is a special-purpose short-range reconnaissance drone. It has a maximum takeoff weight of 5.3 kg and a payload of up to 1 kg. The UAV can develop a speed of up to 130 km/h and climb to 4,000 meters.
As was reported earlier, a battalion of unmanned aerial vehicles will be set up in the Russian military base on the territory of Tajikistan by June 2019. The new unit at the 201st military base will comprise close-and short-range companies armed with Orlan-10, Leyer-3, Eleron, Granat and Takhion drones. The battalion will also comprise a long-range unit armed with Forpost UAVs. (Source: UAS VISION/TASS)
18 Mar 19. Kongsberg Maritime readies HUGIN Superior AUV. Norway’s Kongsberg Maritime is expecting to complete development of its HUGIN Superior multirole autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) by the end of 2019, company officials told Jane’s. The HUGIN Superior will be the newest and largest member of the company’s HUGIN family of modular AUVs, measuring 6.6 m long, 0.875 in diameter, and 2,200kg in weight. The current flagship HUGIN 6000 AUV is 6.2m long and weighs 1,850kg.
The new AUV development, which was launched in December 2018 in Horten, Norway, is designed to manoeuvre at depths of up to 6,000 m, drawing power from a hot swappable and pressure tolerant 62.5 kWh lithium polymer battery. According to Kongsberg, this equates to a 30% increase in onboard energy capacity without altering the AUV’s form factor or size, contributing to an improved endurance of up to 72 hours of runtime when travelling at 3kt, or up to 52 hours at sustained speeds of 4kt with mission payloads operating at 90% of the time in both speed profiles.
The company notes that the extended energy capacity also enables the HUGIN Superior to be fitted with additional mission payloads, which contributes to improved underwater survey or surveillance performance, while maintaining comparable levels of endurance with existing HUGIN AUVs.
The new AUV will be equipped with the company’s latest HISAS 1032 dual-receiver synthetic aperture sonar (SAS), which is claimed to be capable of generating a 1,000m swath at 2.5kt with a typical resolution of 5×5 cm for SAS imagery. It will also feature the EM 2040 Mk II multibeam echo sounder, which offers a swath coverage sector of up to 170° with a single receiver, as opposed to the 140° offered by earlier EM 2040 systems, as well as refined software processing algorithms for improved data quality. (Source: IHS Jane’s)
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