Air Power 2007: BAE Systems leverages UAV investments | ADM Mar 07

1 March 2007

By Gregor Ferguson

Australian UAV command and control technology will play a significant role in developing an Uninhabited Combat Air vehicle (UCAV) which may provide a significant proportion of the UK's future tactical and strategic strike capabilities.

BAE Systems PLC will be the prime contractor and industry leader for a £124 million ($310 million) UK Ministry of Defence UAV technology demonstrator program.

A significant component of the program will be developed at Abbottsford, VIC, by BAE Systems Australia.

The four-year Taranis Technology Demonstrator Program (TDP) forms part of the UK MoD's Strategic Unmanned Air Vehicle (Experimental) (SUAVE) program, and will result in a representative Uninhabited Combat Air vehicle (UCAV) with fully integrated autonomous systems and low observable features.

The Taranis UCAV is jointly funded by the UK MoD and UK industry, and will be developed and flown by BAE Systems in partnership with Rolls-Royce, Smiths Aerospace and UK R&D company QinetiQ, working alongside MoD military staff and scientists.

Taranis will bring together a number of technologies, capabilities and systems to produce a technology demonstrator based around a fully autonomous intelligent system.

Taranis is about the size of a BAE Systems Hawk lead-in Fighter; it will provide the UK MoD with experimental evidence on the potential capabilities of this class of UAV and help to inform decisions on the Royal Air Force's future mix of manned and unmanned fast jet aircraft.

Ground testing of Taranis is expected to take place in early 2009 with the first flight trials taking place in 2010, possibly at Woomera.

SUAVE has resonances with Australia's own Project Air 6000 - New Air Combat Capability (NACC) which seeks to acquire a fleet of manned F-35A Joint Strike Fighters in two tranches and, possibly, some sort of UCAV as part of the third tranche.

BAE Systems Australia is playing a major role in the development of the ground station and flight trials for the Taranis system.

The company's R&D in this area and involvement in the Taranis program is expected to strengthen BAE Systems Australia's bid to play a leading role in the multi-mission unmanned aerial system Air 7000, Phase 1B.

Business development manager Brad Yelland told ADM the company's approach was based on a recognition that a UAV or UCAV is not just an unmanned aeroplane: a UAV challenges traditional practice in the employment of air power by offering previously unavailable persistence, removing much of the risk to the crew of a manned aircraft and allowing greater freedom in the location of UAV operators.

BAE Systems Australia's first major contribution to the parent company's autonomous and future systems programs came through the Corax, Herti and Raven UAV programs.

The company's Air Systems Division at Warton in England took the lead in developing airframes and propulsion.

BAE Systems Australia at Abbottsford focused on their crucial navigation, guidance and ground control systems.

The Australian team was responsible for development and supply of the Airborne Autonomous Mission System, development and supply of the complete ground control station, development and supply of the embedded simulators for mission rehearsal, training and integration testing, support to the systems engineering and integration activities and support to the Flight test activities.

Thanks to the success of these technology demonstrators, BAE Systems Australia will play the same role and make the same critical contribution to the SUAVE program.

The aims of the Abbottsford engineers were to achieve maximum modularity and re-use of software and hardware to maximise autonomy and reliability and reduce costs.

The intent was to develop a single mission system and a single ground system which could be used by all three UAV types, and the secret of BAE Systems Australia's success, says Yelland, was to adopt the various NATO UAV communications and control standards to ensure maximum interoperability.

The three UAVs were all test flown at Woomera, but Herti was also flown in Scotland to demonstrate UK air space compatibility.

These were a stepping stone to the Taranis contract, Yelland told ADM.

The company will carry out its Taranis work at Abbottsford and carry out initial flight checks of the mission system and ground control system using Kingfisher 2 experimental UAVs at the company's new UAV flight test and development centre at East Sale.

Among the deliverables for Taranis will be a duplex and triplex flight control system certified for use in both controlled and uncontrolled civil air space.

The skills and technology base which underpin Australia's contribution to the SUAVE program were developed in large part through a series of CTD contracts won by BAE Systems Australia over the past few years.

One of the first of these, sponsored by the DG Aerospace Development and JP129 project office, was to demonstrate Decentralised Data Fusion (DDF) and Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) by networking two different UAV types carrying different payloads, along with ground surveillance radar and manual inputs from soldiers equipped with binoculars and palm-top computers, and fusing this data into a coherent whole.

The CTD demonstrated a network of eight separate data nodes, all of them moving in and out of the Battlespace; the network was able to self-configure and provide a complete and consistent Common Operating Picture (COP) to every node, Yelland told ADM.

The company was also able to demonstrate autonomous cueing from one radar to the next, and the ability to fly two UAVs concurrently off a single ground station using a single operator.

The second CTD program, which the Air 6000 project office is following closely, was the FURI (Future UAV for Reconnaissance and Interdiction).

This was to develop technologies for a 'First Day of the War' reconnaissance and interdiction capability to penetrate a high threat environment with a lot of jamming.

This achieved a world first last year by demonstrating a SLAM capability in a real-world scenario.

The CTD employed BAE Systems Australia's Kingfisher UAV, ground control station and all-passive sensors to achieve weapons delivery accuracies of less than 15m.

To make things harder, it employed no GPS, no prior ground mapping and an inertial Navigation Unit designed originally for a 30 second high-speed flight in a guided missile.

The FURI CTD used DDF and SLAM to achieve accurate, autonomous, real-time target location and tracking in GPS-denied environments.

Partly as a result of this success BAE Systems Australia now has a contract from Lockheed Martin to analyse the contribution DDF can make to the combat effectiveness and shared situational awareness of a multi-ship formation of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

The company's DDF and SLAM technologies are world-leading, says Yelland, and BAE Systems Australia is now working with the US Air Force's Battlelab to introduce these concepts to the UAV and UCAV work being carried out there.