While unmanned helicopters deployed recently by the Marines to Afghanistan for carrying cargo have recently shown promise, the chief of naval research said the service is pursuing additional technologies to advance the concept and to develop greater autonomy.
Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, the head of the Office of Naval Research, said the current system is capable of autonomously flying to a pre-determined location to bring equipment and supplies to Marines in remote areas. But he wants to add to that capability, and envisions a system that would be able to operate on the basis of “intelligent logic” and allow the helicopter to assess terrain and safe landing zones and then inform Marines on the ground of where it intends to touch down.
“We currently have UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that we can take into theater and we can autonomously bring them into a pre-designated spot and offload,” Klunder told Defense Daily after speaking at an event Friday hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association.
“Now what I am talking about, through using intelligent logic in our system, I can now allow that air vehicle–manned or unmanned–to scan the environment and judge: Here’s a good place to land to support a Marine Corps unit that is in this area,” he said.
Klunder said the Autonomous Aerial Cargo Utility System consists of developing a sensor package that can survey the landscape and integrate that information into the flight control system. Even more important is creating a capability that can interface with manned or unmanned vehicles across all of the services, he said.
Klunder also wants to make the system easier to operate for “Joe Marine” on the ground. He foresees using smartphone style technology that would allow soldiers to quickly tell the aircraft where to go and let it carry out the mission on its own.
“I need to be able to have any Marine, you or I, come up and use our iPhone kind-of mentality, or an Android mentality and…push the button and it happens,” he said. “That’s the autonomous piece that is very important.”
ONR is working with industry and academia to move the technology forward, and even though it poses challenges, Klunder believes it is within reach.
“We think that’s something in the next few years we could accomplish,” he said.
The Marines in November deployed two unmanned Lockheed Martin [LMT]-supplied K-MAX helicopters to Afghanistan and they have since carried out cargo missions. They were developed under the Cargo UAS program to meet an urgent requirement to rely less on ground convoys susceptible to ambushes or roadside bombs.
Boeing [BA] has also been developing an unmanned helicopter known as the A-160T Hummingbird. The Hummingbird has, however, encountered technical problems and Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) said last week it will not be deployed to Afghanistan (Defense Daily, Feb. 16, 2012).