The Army is in the initial stages of developing a Universal Ground Control Station (UGCS) that will operate more than one unmanned aerial vehicle, a service official said.
Col. Greg Gonzalez, Army project manager for Unmanned Aircraft System, told sister publication Defense Daily in a recent interview that UGCS “is a follow-on to the [One System Ground Control Station] that will truly be a one ground control station that operates the Shadow and the [Extended Range Multi-Purpose] ERMP and eventually…the Hunter.”
AAI Corp. [TXT], which developed the OSGCS, is working on the Universal Ground Control Station.
The OSGCS is used with the Shadow, ERMP and Hunter, but “it is not a system right now where you can seamlessly operate one aircraft or the other,” Gonzalez said.
While the UGCS is now under development only for the Army, it is being developed with an open architecture, he said.
The modular and networked UGCS is being developed for multi-UAS control and uses simple, web-based interfaces. It has a net-centric design and is flexible for use in joint service configurations.
The unmanned aerial systems (UAS) Task Force in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, responsible for looking across the Defense Department, to the greatest extent possible is working to ensure commonality among the services. The UAS Task Force has a number of integrated product teams focusing on different UAS aspects, and one is interoperability.
“They’ve put my office in charge of developing an open architecture for ground control stations, basically,” Gonzalez said.
“We are developing an open architecture–that does not mean all services have to use one ground control station–but they can use this architecture and apply it to their own version and then that will ensure interoperability so that we can fly ERMPs and Predators with a very similar unit,” Gonzalez said. “You can share video, you can snatch control of it, but each of the services can then have their own unique components, which I think is very exciting.”
To date, development of the UCGS is done in contractor facilities and at the System Integration Lab at Redstone Arsenal, Ala.–where Gonzalez’s office is located.
“The concept is once we have the initial prototypes ready we will send those out to Dugway [Proving Ground, Utah],” he said.
In September, the Army Unmanned Aircraft Systems Project Office opened the Rapid Integration and Acceptance Center (RIAC) at Dugway, which will consolidate the testing of UAS payloads and technologies to allow for faster deployment to warfighters (Defense Daily, Sept. 25).
“That’s one of the great things about the RIAC. We’ll have Shadow there, we’ll have ERMPs, we’ll have Hunters and we’ll have those UGCS that we’ll be able to test the interoperability and eventually be able to train soldiers to operate all those aircraft,” Gonzalez said. “We plan to have every type of aircraft in our inventory out at Dugway by about June 2010.”
In late October, Northrop Grumman [NOC] received a $6.2 million contract to move the Army’s Hunter UAS training and engineering test facilities to the RIAC from Cochise College Flight Line, Douglas, Ariz. The currently deployed MQ-5B Hunter is the next-generation of the Army’s first fielded UAS, the RQ-5A Hunter. It uses the OSGCS.
The last UAS to roll into the RIAC will be the ERMP, and then all the aircraft will be at RIAC.
“The first time we integrate the Universal Ground Control Station into one of our aircraft will be 2011 with the Shadow,” Gonzalez said. “What we’ll be able to do by early 2011, depending on technical maturity, we’ll be able to move some of those things out to Dugway. We’ll have all the necessary components to include One System Remote Video Terminal that receives data from all those products, so our concept is if you have everything in the inventory out there you can begin to experiment and integrate things rapidly and make sure they’re all interoperable.”