By Michael Sirak
The Pentagon’s advanced research shop and industry partner Northrop Grumman [NOC] are moving into the next phase of a program that will allow Army personnel to coordinate the tactical operations of unmanned sensor aircraft more efficiently and enable soldiers at lower echelons in areas like urban terrain to call up and receive imagery readily from these platforms, officials from both organizations said yesterday.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Northrop Grumman showed during the initial phase of the Heterogeneous Unmanned Reconnaissance Team (HURT) program that the technology is feasible, Michael Pagels, the agency’s program manager for the effort, told reporters during a briefing Nov. 28 in Arlington, Va.
During HURT II, the 26-month follow-on effort, the focus will be on demonstrating these capabilities in more realistic environments, Pagels said.
“I believe we are now making it much more tactically relevant and moving into more expert levels of operations,” he said.
Appearing with Pagels was H.R. Keshavan, Northrop Grumman’s HURT program manager.
DARPA and Northrop Grumman are currently definitizing the terms of the HURT II contract and expect to finalize the transaction within the next several weeks, Pagels said. Because the parties are in the midst of negotiations, neither would elaborate on the potential dollar value of this work. DARPA spent about $14 million in HURT phase I activities, he said.
HURT II work actually began in September. The phase will consist of two parts: an 18-month stage 2.1, and an eight-month stage 2.2 that will conclude in March 2009.
During stage 2.1, the focus will be on development and demonstration. But during this time, there will be several spinoff opportunities for the Army to take the HURT technologies and incorporate them into its operations, both officials said. The first spinoff point will occur five months from the start of phase 2.1, the second and succeeding spinoffs will come every four months thereafter, they said.
Phase 2.2 will focus on the formal transition of the HURT system from DARPA to Army and its employment with the land service, Pagels said.
The HURT system consists of portable control consoles called the HC3s and manportable “bricks” about the size of an AC power adapter on conventional laptop computers that plugs into existing unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) ground control stations and assume control.
The equipment is designed to provide automatic and real-time control of the UAVs and their sensors. It integrates the imagery collection, prioritizes task management of the UAVs and disseminates the imagery from these platforms, which can have diverse flight and sensing characteristics, in an integrated fashion, according to DARPA.
The gear translates imagery requests from soldiers into autonomous tasking and control of the unmanned platforms, the agency says.
“The important point about all of this is that the latency that occurs between making the request and actually getting the UAV on task under HURT is collapsed to seconds, whereas historically when it is done through the manual process it is variable, but it is minutes of time,” Pagels said.
Currently, HURT works with electro-optical and infrared sensors.
The HURT equipment is designed to work with existing Army UAV ground control stations. The current approach, Pagels said, is that the HURT gear will create no additional manpower requirements on the Army beyond the current personnel involved in the operations and support of the existing ground control stations.
The HURT system is platform agnostic, meaning it can work with a variety of unmanned aircraft systems, including the Fire Scout, Hummingbird, Pointer, Raven, ScanEagle, Shadow, Warrior and Wasp, according to Pagel’s briefing charts. It can also function with manned aircraft.
One example of a scenario showing the value of HURT involves a forward operating base (FOB) that uses a number of small UAVs to provide perimeter security, Pagels said.
“Rather than having individual soldiers flying those UAVS by hand and exploiting the images, you can pass that off to the HURT system,” he explained. “HURT will then do area surveillance and will actually control the ground stations and place the planes on flight paths that are appropriate to cover all of the area around the FOB’s perimeter at a certain revisit rate. And then [it will] provide that imagery as a big mosaic…to the people who are responsible for maintaining security.”
In the event that an attack occurs on the base and one of the UAVs leaves the perimeter to pursue the attackers, the HURT system would automatically generate and apply new flight profiles for the UAVs to fill the coverage gap, Pagels said.
One of the advantages of HURT is that it decouples the warfighter from the immediate control of the UAVs so that they can concentrate on other issues such as the study of the imagery, Pagels said.
DARPA wants to show during HURT II that it can dramatically decrease the latency between a soldier making the request for imagery and getting the imagery, Pagels said. IT also wants to provide “lower and lower echelons of users, not just colonels or majors” with access to imagery, he said.
“We are pushing it as close to the pointy edge of the spear as we can where they can make a specific request without going through an intermediary for the specific information they need,” Pagels said. “And we are getting them that information through any means possible. So we are not just giving them access to their specific UAV. They have access to the whole fleet of UAVs.”
During HURT II, activities will also center on tying HURT operations closely into the U.S. military’s airspace management systems, he said.
Another focus area will be integrating the tactics, training and procedures for exploiting HURT with Army’s training and educational infrastructure, he said. Since using HURT will mean that soldiers will have to relinquish the control of their organic UAVs at times so that these platforms can execute more pressing taskings, there will be a cultural transition necessary for the Army to make, Pagels said.
HURT also has potential applications in homeland security and border patrol, according to Northrop Grumman.