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home > February 2008 issue > article
Air Force to advance small UAVs and systems
By David F. Carr
Special to Washington Technology
The Air Force is preparing a new research and evaluation program
aimed at improving small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology
and moving new systems into production quickly.
In a presolicitation notice published in late
December, the Air Force said it anticipates making
four to six contract awards for the Small
UAS Research and Evaluation (SURE) program,
which will have a funding ceiling of
$49.999 million. An unmanned aerial system
(UAS) includes ground control and other related
systems, in addition to the UAVs, and the
SURE program will have a broad mandate to
look at improving every element of these systems.
Among other things, the Air Force says it wants SURE to: - Develop concepts to address UAS needs and deficiencies.
- Perform research for a concept’s maturation and risk reduction.
- Establish readily available technology sources for research and
evaluation.
- Provide fast task-order procurement of studies, research and development,
component fabrication, facility support, test plans and
other key aspects of small UAS development.
Lindsay Voss, a research analyst at Frost and
Sullivan, said the Air Force is starting to pay
more attention to smaller UAVs. Many are small
enough to be carried in a soldier’s backpack and
simple enough to be flown with minimal training
with what is essentially a sophisticated equivalent
of a model airplane controller. Larger
UAVs, such as the Predator, have more extensive
surveillance and combat capabilities but
also require more elaborate launch and control
systems and have to be flown remotely by trained pilots.
Small UAVs are being used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan to
scout enemy positions, identify targets for air strikes or artillery, and
patrol defensive perimeters. “A big driver is the fact that they’re cheap
and fairly effective in their ability to provide reasonably good surveillance,” Voss said. “The technology is all the time progressing and will continue to get better.”
At the same time, there’s substantial room for improvement in
things like the quality of the video sent from a UAV, which is affected
by the fact that these small vehicles are easily buffeted by the
wind, Voss said. “It can be almost like watching video taken on a
roller coaster.”
The service with the most experience deploying small UAVs is
the Army, not the Air Force, given the Army’s extensive use of the
4-pound Raven B, Voss said.
But the Air Force organized the Battlefield Air Targeting Micro Air
Vehicle (BATMAV) program and selected the 1-pound Wasp III as its
UAV of choice in December 2006. Both the Wasp and the Raven are
from AeroVironment.
The BATMAV contract was initially valued at $45 million, and the
Marine Corps recently used the contract vehicle to place a $19.3 million order. The Marines plan to use the Wasps at the platoon level, in
addition to the Ravens it has deployed to companies and battalions.
Voss said she would expect the SURE contract to attract bids from
a number of relatively small, specialized aerospace companies including
AeroVironment, Cyber Defense Systems and Aurora Flight
Sciences.
AeroVironment spokesman Steven Gitlin wouldn’t comment on his
company’s plans regarding the SURE program. But he added that it
already has a track record of advancing the state of the art, particularly
by making UAVs more compact and capable.
“A soldier has to carry bullets, armor, water and food, so if we
can make these things smaller, there’s less that gets displaced from
that backpack,” he said. On the other hand, “if we want the individual
soldier to have this capability, it has to be small enough to
be carried around with them, so there are going to be some tradeoffs
by definition.”
In other words, a 1-pound Wasp can’t possibly carry the same
image stabilization systems as a 200-pound Shadow, a larger UAV
used by the Army and Marines.
“That said, imagery is one of the things we’re continuing to
improve,” Gitlin said. Another area for further development is adding
offensive capabilities to surveillance, which has so far been the main
use of small UAVs, he said.
AeroVironment is already developing Switchblade, a tubelaunched,
battery-powered UAV that would carry an explosive
charge, so that when it finds its target — an insurgent planting an
improvised explosive device, for example — it can be armed to
explode on impact as a guided munition.
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