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Collaborative Autonomy, Swarming Advancing in Next Generation Military Drone Systems

The field of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) is rapidly diversifying as an array of light, mid-sized, and heavy UCAVs and munitions enter the global marketplace.

Drones have revolutionized warfare. The field of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) is rapidly diversifying as an array of light, mid-sized, and heavy UCAVs and munitions enter the global marketplace. This has the potential to dramatically expand access to armed unmanned platforms and change the way drones are used in combat.

These UCAVs are beginning to be equipped with increasingly sophisticated technologies that are enabling new capabilities. “There are definitely advancements in a lot of different fields that are contributing to a re-shaping of military drone operations,” says Dan Gettinger, director of publications and communications for the Vertical Flight Society (VFS) and author of the book Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles: Current Types, Ordnance and Operations. “This includes automatic landing and take-off capabilities for military drones and increasing automation for them. The personnel required to launch and recover military drones has dramatically reduced. This means you can have lighter footprint operations. Drones are being equipped with satellite communications, which previously was only in the realm of larger drones. Where once military drones were largely used for missile strikes over land, now they’re being used in a greater variety of missions over different domains, not just land domains. Maritime domains are increasingly being a more important domain not only in the United States, but in other countries as well.”

What follows are examples of some of the new technologies that are innovating military drone performance.

Antenna, Munitions, and a Swarm

One way UCAVs are improving is via modern antenna designs. Recent advances in materials and fabrication technologies are now enabling improved antenna designs with reduced size, weight, aerodynamic drag, and cost. Next-generation antenna designs by companies like Berwyn, Pennsylvania-based TE Connectivity include composite materials and novel selective metallization processes. These innovations on military drones combine to allow cost-effective realization of 3-D antennas that are mechanically robust and can withstand the harsh conditions found in military operations. Modern antenna designs can increase unmanned vehicle fuel efficiency through reduced antenna size, increased antenna conformality, and reduced antenna weight.

Also, “There is an expansion of munitions being equipped on military drones and different munitions are being tested on drones,” Gettinger says. “For a long time, we had the archetypal Predator drone, but the field of armed drones has diversified to include smaller and larger aircraft, so the family of munitions has also diversified. We see more variety in the types of munitions on them; we’ll see further automation demonstrated in the loitering munitions.”

New technology is allowing UCAVs to flock together as they fly in swarm-like formations, tracking their positions and maintaining their relative positions in the air. Human operators are not needed for every individual flying drone; instead, they direct the flock as one. New software is allowing UCAV platforms to work together in formations to overwhelm adversaries and fly into areas that are too dangerous for men and women in uniform. Under a contract from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s DARPA, the Tucson, Ariz.-based division of Raytheon Technologies is developing tools to autonomously control swarms of ground- and air-based drones. Using speech and gestures, operators will be able to direct swarming tactics among multiple and different drones from a tablet or other device.

Raytheon Technologies’ small, tube-launched Coyote UAS has its own special software that enables several of them to fly as a swarm. Raytheon

Raytheon Technologies’ small, tube-launched Coyote UAS has its own special software that enables several of them to fly as a swarm, and the company recently gave a demonstration. “I would say they performed flawlessly,” Pete Mangelsdorf, a director for Tucson, Arizona-based Raytheon Missiles & Defense, a business of Raytheon Technologies, told Avionics in an emailed interview. “It's a breakthrough technology that uses information sharing between drones, which enables autonomous, collaborative behavior.”

Today’s Technology Aids UCAVs

Scope-creep, excessive complexity, unaffordability, long development cycles, and challenging maintenance requirements in austere conditions are some of the negative aspects that Luke Ionno principal engineer, innovation at Bloomfield, Connecticut-based Kaman Air Vehicles says have resulted in limited adoption of actual new/next-generation unmanned airborne platforms. “To achieve timely fielding of new platforms that addresses specific—and in some cases, urgent—end-user needs, careful management of these areas is required. Practical, affordable, and robust systems are often at odds with defaulting to employment of exquisite/bleeding edge technology.”

To improve UCAV performance, there has been a strong push in recent years for open system architecture to avoid vendor lock, as well as higher levels of autonomy and artificial intelligence to reduce cognitive workload.

“Future control of military unmanned systems will require hardware agnostic control systems that facilitate the operation of multiple types/classes of unmanned systems,” Jim Ryan, senior director of global military sales and strategy at Textron Systems, told Avionics in emailed statements. “The flexibility of this software-centric approach enables greater mission flexibility by embedding control in existing hardware for significant cost savings.”

Textron's Aerosonde HQ on display during a recent aerospace and defense conference and exhibition. Textron

As the aerospace and defense industry collectively pushes toward higher levels of autonomy—all military drones are piloted to some degree; there are no fully autonomous drones—Gettinger says some drones can identify and attack targets without human intervention.

Northrop Grumman is an example of a manufacturer that has autonomous aircraft flying today and is looking to increase the level of collaborative autonomous information sharing and navigation between drones and manned aircraft as well. “With continued miniaturization of sensors, reducing cost of future mission payloads, and also working to drive down the human-to-machine ratio (from multiple humans per machine to multiple machines per human), Northrop Grumman is focused on developing the next generation of advanced networked heterogeneous UAS platforms and capabilities underpinned by adoption of open architectures, cyber security hardening, and AI/ML in a peer/near-peer environment—all powered by collaborative autonomy,” Richard Sullivan, vice president, future programs, Northrop Grumman, told Avionics in an emailed statement.

Among the aircraft with autonomous navigation already flying for Northrop include the Global Hawk and Triton, both of which perform Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) collection missions with “24-plus hour endurance,” according to Sullivan. Additionally, the company’s next generation MQ-8C Fire Scout is being developed to become the U.S. Navy’s first ship-based autonomous helicopter.

Outside of increased autonomy, the next generation of military autonomous platforms will be characterized by digital design, according to Sullivan. The principles of digital design enable rapid prototyping, virtual testing, and performance-based feedback to expedite autonomous aircraft development and enable technology to be fielded faster and at a lower cost than previous generations of systems, he says. “The long-term impacts of digital design and increased autonomy will be felt when swarms of small, possibly expendable autonomous aircraft accompany friendly forces around future battlespaces providing ubiquitous situational awareness and real-time communications to deliver the decisive advantage against adversaries.”

An image from Northrop Grumman's unmanned systems integration center in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Northrop Grumman

Algorithms and UCAVs

While Aided Target Detection and Target Recognition (AiTD/AiTR) is the most well-known, Ryan says the use of AI algorithms in predictive maintenance holds significant promise in driving down costs, improving safety and enhanced mission availability for both manned and unmanned systems.

However, Ionno cautions, machine learning algorithms appear to have limited applicability to military platforms at this point in time due to what he calls the lack of assured, deterministic, and verifiable behavior. “While AI has extensive uses in terms of reducing raw datasets (airborne imagery, radar, sonar, etc.) to actionable intelligence, in many cases, actual control of said platforms (and/or prosecution of missions) by machine learning algorithms does not offer specific, tangible capabilities that couldn’t be implemented via traditional deterministic algorithms.”

There has been an increase in the use of dedicated mission computers with segregated flight critical software. “[This] is allowing rapid integration of mission capability from third party vendors,” Ryan says. “This in turn drives down cost, while significantly reducing integration time.”

The general reduction of the size, weight, power, and cost of processing and sensing capability is beneficial, particularly for smaller platforms. “This reduces overall vehicle footprint for a given capability, and/or reduction of cost to a point where platforms can be treated as expendable assets; however, these generally do not actually enable new or innovative operations,” Kaman’s Ionno says. “The basic mission sets for military unmanned systems remain largely unchanged: intelligence-gathering, engagement of targets (strike), and transport of supplies (logistics). Having said this, improvements to footprint, cost, and availability of LIDAR and radar sensors offer significant potential for streamlining of the basic operations of airborne unmanned systems in all three of these basic mission sets, by enabling enhancements to vehicle autonomy while remaining cost-effective.”

Future UCAV Tech to Watch: Wide-Area Surveillance

A UCAV technological trend already in use and becoming more widely available is wide-area surveillance technology. It gives a military drone an expansive area to survey, sometimes an entire city via wide-area motion imagery. “This technology is increasingly available on smaller and smaller packages and doesn’t require a large drone to operate it,” Gettinger says.

Ryan predicts that higher levels of military drone autonomy will shift the human role from operator to supervisor, allowing the aircraft to operate with minimal input. “The challenge in this shift is less about technology and more about developing policies and regulations that support unmanned systems with greater independence.”

Full-scale model of the KARGO autonomous air vehicle, developed by Kaman Air Vehicles to address modern military challenges arising from the need to resupply widely-distributed units. Kaman Air Vehicles

Ionno believes logistics/resupply platforms (for example, Kaman’s KARGO) are poised to address modern military challenges arising from the need to resupply widely-distributed units. “For these types of platforms to meet their full potential, a high level of autonomy and intelligent swarming (multi-aircraft, single operator) will be required.”