The Army yesterday said it successfully validated the technology and capabilities of the Ground Based Sense and Avoid (GBSAA) System this month in a series of demonstrations held at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.
The Product Directorate for Unmanned Systems Airspace Integration (USAIC) conducted a formal two-week demonstration during the weeks of June 4-8 and June 18-22 with a series of vignettes designed to validate the design and functionality of the Army’s Sense and Avoid technology.
“The demonstration was a total success,” said Viva Austin, product director for the Army’s USAIC. “Not only were we able to meet or exceed every objective established for the demonstration by flying the system against numerous different DoD concepts and locations, but safely flying a synthetic UAS downtown in Salt Lake City against live traffic, and then against recorded Boston airspace data–that really allowed us to validate that the Phase 2 technology we are fielding to Gray Eagle sites works and is almost ready to go prime time.”
The demonstrations included performance of seven live and synthetic vignettes exhibiting the system’s ability to fly in numerous National Airspace System (NAS) environments including Airfield Traffic Patterns, Lateral Transits, Military Operations Areas (MOAs) in Class D, E, and G airspace, the service said in a statement.
There were several specific objectives of the demonstration, including demonstrating the ability to fuse data from 3-D radar and ATC radar (ASR-9) real time, for use in a GBSAA System.
The demonstrations also highlighted the open architecture/plug and play function of the GBSAA System. The capabilities and benefits of the Army Sense and Avoid test bed at Dugway were highlighted, and they provided an early validation of GBSAA Requirements, the Common Requirements Set agreed by the GBSAA Advisory Board representing all the services.
“Both the GBSAA test bed and the full system/concept demonstration turned out to be more successful than we could have hoped for,” Austin said.
Project Manager for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Col. Timothy Baxter said, “After attending the GBSAA demonstration and witnessing the outstanding performance of the system, I am extremely confident that we have a system that will be successful in safely providing a sense and avoid capability to Army UAS.”
The transition of U.S. military units and their UAS to the continental United States and the fielding of the service’s Gray Eagle UAV emphasizes the growing need for UAS access to the National Air Space (NAS) for UAS operators to train and remain technically and tactically proficient. This point, along with the groundswell of interest among other government and non-government agencies to employ unmanned aircraft in the NAS, creates the need for accelerated GBSAA technology development.
On April 27, 2011, the USAIC Product Office, the Office of the Secretary of Defense UAS Task Force lead for GBSAA development, conducted the first ever unmanned aircraft flight within the NAS using an FAA approved GBSAA prototype system. USAIC teamed with Gray Eagle operations to conduct the historic flights at El Mirage, Calif.
In order to accelerate development and fielding time lines for GBSAA, the Army relocated GBSAA test activities to Dugway. The GBSAA test bed was installed there as part of the Army’s Rapid Integration Acceptance Center in the fall of 2011. Two Lightweight Surveillance Target Acquisition Radars (LSTAR) V3, 3-D radar, were installed and integrated into the GBSAA test bed this summer at Dugway.
GBSAA provides a mitigation, or alternate means of compliance with FAA regulatory requirements regarding the ability to see and avoid other aircraft in the NAS, and allows for integration of UAS into the NAS.
The USAIC product directorate is part of the UAS Project Office within the Program Executive Office for Aviation headquartered on Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala.