BAE Systems Australia is this week performing final demonstrations of co-operative autonomous UAVs to locate hostile radars and generate precise targeting coordinates without the use of GPS.
Initial flights were carried out three weeks ago as part of the Australian Department of Defence’s Project Air 5435 Future UAV for Reconnaissance and Interdiction (FURI) concept technology programme, which has been exploring first day of war suppression of enemy air defence mission requirements. This week’s flights will conclude the current research effort, but discussions on a possible successor programme are underway.
Julia Sutcliffe, FURI research leader with BAE Systems Australia, says two of the companies Kingfisher II UAVs are being used in the demonstrations. Both aircraft are equipped with a passive sensing suite comprising electronic warfare and electro-optic sensors.
Air vehicle navigation is being achieved using simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) technology jointly developed by BAE Systems and the University of Sydney. The two UAVs are networked and use distributed data fusion techniques to enable co-operative localisation of their position and to identify targets to within 10-15m.
The inertial measurement units used in the air vehicle navigation suite are former missile hardware, as opposed to current top of the line equipment.
The electronic warfare suite comprises two sensor types. One is a purpose built system using commercial off the shelf components. The second is a re-hosted version of BAE System’s Passive Radar Identification SysteM II (PRISM II) Electronic Support Measures (ESM) system. Each sensor weighs some 4kg.
The current demonstration follows an initial FURI flight demonstration in the second quarter of last year. That phase of the project saw the achievement of sub-15m target location and tracking accuracy, again without the aid of GPS.
Sutcliffe says the latest demonstrations, being carried out at West Sale in southeastern Australia, involve flying the Kingfisher UAVs against a combination of static targets, which are being detected with the electro-optic sensor. There are also “Four radars that come on sequentially are detected with the EW payloads. The name of the game is completely passive sensing at low power and low cost, ideal for low observability operations or operations in hostile environments,” she explains.
The scenarios are based on the lead UAV entering the area of operations and using passive sensing to build up a map of the area using SLAM techniques. That data is passed to the second UAV which adds its own observations to the map as well as using its EW sensors to positively locate radar targets.
“As the UAVs are spotted in the area, sequentially the radars light up. So there is a finite amount of time in which the UAVs are tasked with gathering a target location accuracy of the order of 10m of error on the radar targets, with no GPS [backup].”
Flights in the first week of March showed that “with fifteen minutes of GPS-denied operation we were able to achieve a target location accuracy of the order of 10m-15m”.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
