Key flight tests mark turning point in the Navy’s ability to direct UAVs
By GLENN W. GOODMAN Jr., Special Correspondent
The U.S. Navy has made substantial progress since 2000 in developing a common ground control system for its planned unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), beginning with the vertical takeoff-and-landing Fire Scout to be deployed on the service’s Littoral Combat Ships currently under construction.
The Tactical Control System (TCS) comprises a set of software tools that can be used with different types of computer systems aboard ship or ashore for UAV mission planning and execution, data link communications, and surveillance imagery processing and dissemination. TCS, developed by Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems of Falls Church, Va., will undergo its formal Operational Evaluation with Fire Scout in fiscal year 2008.
Last January, TCS successfully controlled the first autonomous vertical shipboard landings and takeoffs of a developmental Fire Scout aboard a moving ship, the USS Nashville, off the coast of the Naval Air Station, Patuxent River, Md. The UAV took off from the air station and flew to the designated test area under control of a ground-based TCS, which then passed control to a TCS aboard Nashville.
The previous month, a scaled-down prototype laptop derivative of TCS, called the Multiple Vehicle Control System, simultaneously controlled two Advanced Ceramics Research Manta UAVs flying over Arizona and an unmanned surface vessel operating on Chesapeake Bay near Norfolk, Va., from Raytheon’s facility in Falls Church. The demonstration was the first time a single ground station was used to control dissimilar types of unmanned vehicles and their sensor payloads while receiving and displaying streaming video feeds from all the vehicles.
Gerald Bazemore, Raytheon’s director of UAV ground systems, told Seapower that the laptop Multiple Vehicle Control System hosts a subset of the Fire Scout’s full TCS capability. TCS runs on Unix-based computers with the Solaris 8 operating system from Sun Microsystems. Raytheon also has developed a version for computers that use the Linux operating system.
“With the [Multiple Vehicle Control System], we’re trying to get some basic TCS functionality down to a laptop computer form factor that would be conducive, both in terms of size and cost, for some of the smaller UAVs that are proliferating today,” he said.
The latest version of the TCS software, to be delivered to Fire Scout manufacturer Northrop Grumman in July, adds a number of new capabilities. It accommodates diverse “plug-and-play” sensor payloads with minimal software modifications. Also, it complies with a NATO specification called Standardization Agreement 4586 for UAV command and control and message dissemination.
In accordance with that specification, Raytheon has developed a TCS core capability encompassing basic functions for operating a wide variety of U.S. and NATO air vehicles. “Vehicle-specific modules,” developed by different UAV manufacturers in accordance with 4586 standards, will be able to interface with the core system to provide a full TCS control capability.
Another significant improvement in the latest version of TCS is conversion from hybrid analog/digital video processing and storage to pure digital. TCS currently records UAV surveillance data on analog tapes using a videocassette recorder. With the switch to digital storage on computer hard drives, TCS operators will be able to do much more extensive manipulation and analysis of the surveillance data in the ground control station using a new set of software tools under development.
The Navy is now flying two high-altitude, long-endurance Global Hawk UAVs acquired through the Air Force’s production contract with Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems of San Diego for a Global Hawk Maritime Demonstration program. Those vehicles are being used in exercises to help develop operational concepts and tactics for the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) UAV the Navy plans to select in September 2007.
They are being controlled using the Air Force’s existing Global Hawk ground station hardware and software — two Launch-and-Recovery Elements and one Mission Control Element also produced by Raytheon — rather than TCS. Congress deleted money in the Navy’s fiscal year 2004 budget request that was to have been used to develop a TCS capability to control the Global Hawk.
It’s not certain whether the BAMS UAV, slated to enter production in 2011, will be required to use TCS software. The two leading BAMS candidates are the Global Hawk and the Mariner, an extended-range version of the Air Force/General Atomics Predator B.
Capt. Paul Morgan, the program manager for unmanned air systems at Naval Air Systems Command in Patuxent River, said TCS is being evaluated for applicability to BAMS in the Persistent Unmanned Maritime Airborne Surveillance studies being conducted for the program office by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The contractors are defining a family-of-systems architecture for maritime UAVs, developing technical baselines for the systems and performing cost, schedule and technical risk assessments.
The program office for unmanned air systems is chartered to be the procurement agency for all Navy and Marine Corps unmanned air systems, including the new Tier II and III UAVs planned by the Marine Corps [See story, Page 18].
Morgan told Seapower, “My goal, if technically feasible and cost-effective, is to use TCS on all future naval unmanned air systems. It makes too much sense not to try.”
The Army has pursued a different common ground control station for its UAVs, the One System station developed by AAI Corp. of Hunt Valley, Md. It is being used by the service with its AAI Shadow 200, Northrop Grumman/
Israel Aircraft Industries Hunter and new General Atomics Warrior (Predator-derivative) UAVs and, like TCS, is being made compliant with NATO’s 4586 standard.
The Army also is acquiring the Fire Scout from Northrop Grumman as its Future Combat Systems Class IV brigade-level UAV. Northrop Grumman is controlling the Army Fire Scout in initial flight testing using the One System; it will shift over in the future to specialized control gear in common with other unmanned platforms.
Morgan said his office has discussed future cooperative efforts with the Army to share development of specific capabilities within each other’s ground control systems. One possibility is combining the Navy’s TCS software with the Army’s One System hardware.
“We’re doing some experimentation to see if we can host TCS software in the Army’s One System,” he said.
Maj. George Ehlers, who works UAV ground control station issues at Marine Corps Systems Command at Quantico, Va., told Seapower, “I’ve been urging Raytheon and AAI and the Navy and Army program offices to do exactly that, so we can get the nice portability and scalability of the Army’s [field-mobile] hardware and its data dissemination capabilities as well as the shipboard integration provided by TCS.”
The Army system is modular and reconfigurable, he noted, from a man-portable remote video terminal that can receive and display live imagery to multiple workstation configurations.
The latest upgrade to TCS also provides scalability, so that an Army ground control station can encompass a single operator workstation or multiple workstations, depending on the type of air vehicle and the number of vehicles being controlled at the same time.
Morgan said, “My goal for all of our programs of record — Fire Scout, BAMS and the Marine Corps’ Tier II and Tier III UAVs — is to have common ground control software and a common user interface. We may not have a common hardware solution, but we want them to have as much commonality as is practical.
“I meet with my Army and Air Force counterparts on a bimonthly basis face to face to ensure that we plan our procurements with as much commonality as possible. We are all interested in common standards, not only [Standardization Agreement]-like standards but also standards for workstation displays as well as for data links, to make us more interoperable.”
