The US Army will install an advanced multi-sensor pilotage system on its experimental autonomous Black Hawk helicopter in the first quarter of fiscal year 2027.
If installed well, autonomy could enable aircrews to manage greater complexity on the battlefield while reducing their cognitive and physical workload, in addition to improving the combat mission performance of novice, busy, fatigued and/or injured pilots.
The system, known as the Degraded Visual Environment Pilotage System, or DVEPS, will serve as the primary perception sensor guiding the H-60Mx OPV, through dust, fog, smoke and darkness — conditions that have historically forced even experienced human pilots to abort landings or fly by instruments alone.
Built by SNC, the sensor package fuses lidar and passive infrared imagery into a continuously updated 3D model of the terrain below, allowing an aircraft to "see" through obscurants that defeat the naked eye and ordinary cameras alike, the company claims.
The Army's push toward optimally and fully uncrewed rotary wing aircraft has advanced quickly on the software side. Sikorsky's fly-by-wire retrofit of a standard UH-60M, paired with its Matrix autonomy suite, has already demonstrated that a Black Hawk can be flown by a reduced crew, a single remote operator with a tablet or no one at all.
The Army has designated the resulting H-60Mx OPV as the flight testbed for its Strategic Autonomy Flight Enabler program, an effort to build a scalable autonomy kit as part of Black Hawk modernisation and as platform-agnostic autonomy maturation for the future vertical lift family of systems.
“Rotary wing aircraft face an especially acute version of this problem,” vice president for government relations at SNC and former US Army Apache helicopter pilot, Scott Gallaway, said.
“A helicopter's own rotor wash can kick up a blinding cloud of sand or snow in the final seconds of landing, a hazard so persistent in combat operations that it has caused fatal accidents and driven the military to treat ‘brownout’ and ‘whiteout’ landings as a distinct engineering challenge rather than an edge case.”
Cameras alone are not enough. Standard electro-optical sensors, the kind that give a drone or a pilot a clear video feed on a sunny day, degrade sharply in the exact conditions where sense-and-avoid matters most, such as obscured landing zones, low light or adverse weather.
Radar can penetrate some of that obscurant but struggles with the fine-grained terrain and obstacle detail a landing aircraft needs.
The emerging consensus across both military and civil aviation is that no single sensor modality is sufficient; safe autonomous flight instead depends on fusing complementary sensors, including lidar's precision, radar's penetration and infrared's low-light performance into a single, trustworthy picture, then compressing that fused picture into a decision an aircraft can act on in real time.
“What makes DVEPS relevant to an uncrewed aircraft is it does not simply display raw sensor data and leave interpretation to a person. It continuously builds and updates a real-time model of the surrounding terrain, obstacles and hazards and can operate in a ‘set-and-forget’ automatic mode,” Gallaway said.
“That is, functionally, the same output an autonomous system needs to make its own flight decisions. Installing it on the H-60Mx OPV converts a pilot-aid system into a machine-perception system, giving the aircraft's autonomy software the equivalent of trained eyes rather than an unfiltered camera feed.”
The Army has laid out a clear test of that conversion. Once installed in early 2027, DVEPS-equipped autonomy aboard the H-60Mx OPV is intended to support the aircraft's broader development, integration and operational testing mission, advancing not just the platform itself but the software and mission systems layered onto it, including third-party autonomy packages and air-launched effects like the ones the Army has already tested from crewed Black Hawks.