The Army and Navy are on the cusp of fielding unmanned robotic systems in a variety of roles, but for the systems to gain a wide foothold in military operations, the services must establish common hardware and software standards to command and control them.
Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh, chief of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, said unmanned systems are an ideal example where requirements for open architecture software interfaces will speed integration of future capabilities.
“The open-architecture piece, I think is critical,” Walsh said this week at the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s annual defense conference in Washington, D.C. “We see unmanned systems as probably the best case for being able to do that than we see in a lot of our larger, more integrated platforms.”
“Being able to operate with open architecture systems where vendors are able to take their own capability that is in their own box and maintain those technical rights in there but they work within the interface baselines that we’ve got … to operate plug-and-play capability.”
The Army is in the process of developing a baseline framework for its universal ground control station (UGCS) into which multiple unmanned systems designs can be plugged and operated by a common system, said Brig. Gen. Robert Marion, program executive officer for aviation.
“What we would like to do is get to a point where we have a baseline framework … a baseline architecture, a baseline foundation where we can then incorporate …apps that address obsolescence issues we find ourselves dealing with, with cyber threats and vulnerabilities we find ourselves dealing with.”
Photo: U.S. Army
“This is not just something we want to do with our unmanned systems,” he said. “In our manned platforms, if we could do something like this, it would be an exponential opportunity for us to deliver capabilities at great value.”
“The big thing for us from a government perspective is to not have to go through the extensive developmental testing and requalification every time we need to do that. That’s a big hurdle for us to get through. Those requirements requalification are legitimate and we should be doing that, but we have to get away from point-to-point solutions, single solutions for single applications and get to a framework where we don’t have to repeat qualifications over time.”
A main goal is to extend control of unmanned systems payloads, particularly sensors on remotely piloted air vehicles, to manned aircraft, ground vehicles and dismounted troops, Marion said. The service already is working on controlling multiple unmanned aerial vehicles from a single ground control station.
“There are a lot of technical capabilities out there, we just have to put it all in a framework that enables us to get the maximum amount of participation and competition and ability for people to compete and be a part as we possibly can,” Marion said.
Both the Marine Corps and Army are looking to the commercial sector for existing technologies like small quadcopter-type UAS that can be almost immediately bought and fielded with little or no testing.
Marion said the commercial marketplace is an excellent source of baseline technologies, but the military needs to perform after-market development and upgrades so that its unmanned systems are superior to those available to the public, and therefore potential enemies.
“It’s not always as simple as just going out to industry and seeing what’s available in the commercial marketplace, because if it is available in the commercial marketplace, it is available to our threats, it’s available to everyone else,” Marion said.
“That can be a starting point for us and in some cases it’s OK,” he added. “In other cases, we have to go beyond what is available in the commercial marketplace and develop it so that we have overmatch over whatever the threat might be.”
Integrating new unmanned systems as they become available simply for the sake of fielding unmanned systems could perpetuate the problem with disparate control stations if the services do not have clearly defined architecture standards, said Rear Adm. Robert P. Girrier, the Navy’s director of unmanned warfare systems.
Girrier said the sea service has more than a dozen different control station designs for its various UAS alone, not to mention the surface and underwater robots it is developing.
“We don’t want that,” Girrier said. “It’s understandable how that evolves over time when you are sampling various things, but … it’s much better to have common control system and software.”
Once those disparate systems, along with surface and undersea unmanned systems, can be controlled by one or a few common ground stations, then the systems will gain much wider usage in the fleet, Girrier said.
One of the Navy’s main concerns with fielding unmanned systems to the fleet is eating up space aboard ship with various control stations for air, surface and undersea robots, said Bob Kimble,deputy PEO for unmanned aviation at Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR). To simplify training and control while saving valuable deck space, the Navy wants a baseline unmanned systems control architecture that will allow a single control station to switch not only between platforms, but from one domain to the other, he said.