The Australian Department of Defence (DoD) is to launch a series of future unmanned air vehicle concept studies and will investigate a common operating architecture as part of evolution of its military UAV roadmap.
Dr Peter Maguire, director of aerospace systems analysis at the DoD, says priority will be given to resolving "horizontal integration" issues in the future Australian unmanned systems architecture.
"We note with interest that the Americans are moving from a UAV roadmap to an unmanned systems roadmap with a focus on systems. We need to get ahead of the curve and examine communications systems that we will need in the future to make UAVs work," says Maguire.
The DoD "will be conducting a number of UAV concept studies to look at what those future concepts are that we should be investing in. Critically tied to that is what we call a UAV common architecture study. That will…examine both the internal and external architectures surrounding UAVs, everything to do with commonality in control systems and product dissemination. It may move to the consideration of more novel approaches to the acquisition of UAV systems."
Source: Flight International
