Lockheed Martin [LMT] Feb. 18 said it received a contract from the Army Robotics Technology Consortium to conduct a fully autonomous reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition experiment using both its Squad Mission Support System (SMSS) unmanned ground vehicle and its K-MAX unmanned air vehicle.
The terms of the contract are not being disclosed.
Collaborating with Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, later this year, in a notional scenario, autonomous rotorcraft K-MAX will sling load a Gyrocam-equipped SMSS and bring it to a simulated area deemed too risky for people. K-MAX will position itself over the intended release point, autonomously set down and release the SMSS when commanded by a remote operator. K-MAX then returns to base.
Once on the ground, using the Gyrocam reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition sensor, the SMSS will locate, observe and gather coordinates of targets and other objects of interest. The coordinates and sensor imagery will be passed back by a satellite communications system to a remote operations center hundreds of miles away for analysis.
“This level of mission cooperation between unmanned air and ground vehicles of this size, controlled beyond line-of-sight, is an industry first,” said Joe Zinecker, director of combat maneuver systems at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. “This demonstration could lead to expanded missions, such as remote sensing and monitoring of suspected chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive threats or events.”
K-MAX is “very, very reliable, very, very cheap,” Jim Naylor, Business Development Aviation Systems at Lockheed Martin Mission Systems and Training during a Feb. 18 company briefing. Operating since 2011 and working in Afghanistan, it has lifted more than 4 million pounds and conducted more than 1,700 sorties to date, Naylor said.
Built from the ground up as a logistics resupply platform K-MAX costs about $1,300 an hour, making it less expensive to operate than a convoy, he said.
K-MAX is working on several contracts.
This new SMSS -K-MAX demonstration will be a follow-up to a 2012 exercise at Camp Grayling, Mich., where a Gyrocam-equipped SMSS, operated via satellite from more than 200 miles away, successfully conducted a simulated reconnaissance mission.
For the Marines, K-MAX has deployed to Afghanistan, and is hauling cargo. In fact, “20 percent of what we’re doing is retrograde,” which was not the original resupply mission, Naylor said. L-MAX is hauling out everything from broken components that can be repaired to “stuff” like pallets that need to come back–“whatever they want taken out,”
For the Army Aviation Applied Technology Directorate, K-MAX is acting as a test bed, demonstrating autonomous technology, which will then potentially be fielded.
In a contract for the Office of Naval Research, Lockheed Martin is competing with
Aurora Flight Sciences to take a technological leap forward. There will be a demonstration in March in which K-Max will land after an operator clicks a button on a simple control device five nautical miles away. The autonomous rotorcraft will not do a fly over, but will use its sensors to determine the best place to land.
Naylor said one contractor will be chosen–most likely in June–for the next phase of the program. Proposals already are in for the next phase, which isn’t defined as yet.
As to what the future holds, Naylor said he’d like to see “the number of aircraft grow. The Marines are interested. The Army is looking at it.” And there are other missions to consider, such as humanitarian relief, and firefighting.
“We can’t prove it, but absolutely I believe we’re saving lives,” Naylor said. “The demand is not coming down.”