Thales UK is investigating the technical requirements of future UAVs optimised for civil policing and homeland security missions under a in-house enabling research programme launched in late 2006.
The research effort is predicated on UAVs augmenting, rather than replacing, manned aircraft in conducting civilian policing tasks, particularly in urban areas.
However, airspace integration issues remain a major challenge for the successful introduction of UAVs into the role.
Sara Howitt, chief UAV engineer with Thales UK aerospace, says UAVs "are likely to supplement manned operations, not ever replace. They may replace in certain tasks like doing high-profile patrols, doing photographic taskings. They [police forces] really want persistent tracking and imaging capability, so looking at routine surveillance taskings and high risk operations."
High-risk operations in the civil context would to arise in terms of a disaster or major accident situation, Howitt says. For example, the 2006 Buncefield oil storage depot fire in southern England represents "a typical operation where you might want to use a UAV rather than a manned aircraft. It is hot, it is dirty it is nasty," she says.
Full integration of UAVs into non-segregated airspace is fundamental to development of the police market, Howitt says. While this is being explored at a policy level in the UK via initiatives such as the Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment (ASTRAEA) programme, the enabling technologies needed to provide autonomous sense and avoid capabilities for UAVs are receiving less attention.
"There is not enough going on in that areaNobody is really pushing to come up with those technologies that will fit in a whole raft of UAVs and make it actually fit back into manned aviation."
Police UAV operations in urban areas will also necessitate new technical development efforts in the field of obstacle avoidance, navigation in limited visibility environments, communications loss, obstacle avoidance, and sensor obscuration, she says.
"We have got to balance the map-based with the sensor-based data and match that with your collision-avoidance technique. We want to balance UAV visibility operations, and you want to balance that with safety. When you are planning to go around urban areas, and you might be flying quite low over those urban areas, you have got to look at your line of sight to whatever you want to track or look at, with safety first. Are you in the vicinity of buildings? Are you in the vicinity of wires?" she asks.
The introduction of UAVs may also give rise, Howitt warns, to the development of counter-UAV and counter-surveillance capabilities by criminal organisations.
"People are going to get used to UAVs flying around them, and they will find a way to counter that. So what we have got to do is find a way to counter their counter surveillance. That is a challenge in itself. How are we going to do that? We could add sophisticated reasoning in there we could look at tactics that are being used and developed today [by military users] we could look at the technologies on board such as the propulsion that you use - batteries as opposed to diesel," says Howitt.
Source: Flight International
