The Navy is studying efforts to develop a single ground station for unmanned air systems (UAS) as well as a common command and control (C2) architecture for all unmanned systems, according to a top service official.
As the demand for unmanned aircraft grows, and as more companies enter the field, developing everything from man-portable to larger long-endurance platforms, the number of ground control stations is increasing, Rear Adm. William Shannon, program executive officer (PEO) unmanned aviation and strike weapons, told sister publication Defense Daily recently.
“The interoperability of our systems is still a challenge. We have a lot of different ground stations from different systems that can’t talk to one another,” he said. “We are working on a common C2 architecture that would allow different UAS from different companies to be controlled by one control station.”
Shannon noted the effort is “not a real funded program of record.”
“We are working that internally to come up with standards. We are also working with OSD. They are very much involved with us,” he added.
Not only is PEO Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons looking at a common command and control architecture for UAS, but the organization has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with PEO Littoral Mine Warfare, which has unmanned surface and unmanned underwater vehicles in its portfolio, Shannon said.
“We’ve also talked to the Marine Corps and their joint program office with the Army for ground vehicles. We are looking for a way to have one common architecture that would allow you to integrate software applications for sensors and things like that into one government-owned C2 architecture,” he said.
Shannon equates the effort to what Apple [AAPL] has done with developing applications for its iPhone.
“Apple owns the core operating software and they have some core applications they will hold onto. Then they provide a SDK (software development kit) to anybody that wants to provide an application that would ride on essentially their C2 architecture,” he said. “That’s what we are looking at.”
PEO Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons has been leading the discussion, Shannon said.
“When you think about it, we have bought multiple UAS systems and other command and control systems, manned systems; we have purchased the same core operating software, the same admin and security and messaging and timing type of software over and over from our vendors,” he said. “Why wouldn’t we want to own and control that and for competition allow folks to provide the essential applications for sensor operations, navigation, for weather? Why wouldn’t we have one standard application to work weather, mission planning…?”
There is tremendous opportunity, Shannon added. The Navy just has to figure out how to do this without making programs that are almost completed start over.
“The problem is, everybody is well underway on creating their own ground stations and many of them exist, so how do you get them to fall back on this common [architecture] without causing them additional time and money? That’s the challenge for us right now,” he said.
One other issue for Shannon is bandwidth management.
“You have heard the Air Force talk about it. In fact, I think they said with the next orbit they put out there they will have more orbits than the bandwidth can handle from a data flow standpoint,” he said.
One of the things the Navy has to manage is the flood of information, and not just the impact on the personnel trying to make use of the information, but the communication systems and the ability to handle all the data flowing through the communication links, Shannon added.
“There are lots of ways to manage that. There are procedural ways to manage it where you prioritize who gets what data. You would start to institute some policies that perhaps put a limit on just how much full motion video commanders would ask for,” he said.
But this isn’t about data from small unmanned systems. Rather, Shannon said this is the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data larger systems such as Predator, reaper, Global Hawk and the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) UAS provide. “[I am] talking about things that will be saturating our satellite communications.”
As an example, Shannon pointed to carrier battle groups that are constrained by the bandwidth they can employ.
“Before, it was a big deal if they had a system that sent them one or two megabytes of data. Now, you are talking about multiple systems sending hundreds of megabytes of data. How are they going to have the bandwidth to deal with that? We are going to have to do something,” he said. “You are going to have to manage that bandwidth through policy and procedure, but also you have to do things with processing onboard the sensors so you don’t have to send raw data down to be processed by the ship based system.”
Instead of sending raw data down, the system would send the processed context down, Shannon said. “That’s not something that is right around the corner. We have work to do on that.”