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Special Ops Drone Techniques Shared With Marine Corps
Lockheed Martin image
U.S. Special Operations Command’s tactics, techniques and procedures for using small drones are spreading to at least one other service.
The Marine Corps is replacing its long-serving Light Armored Vehicle with BAE Systems’ Amphibious Combat Vehicle Command, Control, Communication and Computers/Uncrewed Aerial Systems, known as the ACV C4 UAS, according to Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works’ UAS and attritable systems director Jacob Johnson.
From that vehicle, Marines want to dispatch Stalker and Indago intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drones that Lockheed Martin has refined continually since their introduction in 2006 and 2012, he said.
“Collaboration with our SOCOM and Marine Corps customers and industry partners has enabled the rapid development of needed capabilities for the warfighter,” Johnson said.
Both drones are part of ongoing contractor verification tests, he said.
The vehicle will act as a “battlefield quarterback” with Marine Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalions — collecting, processing and distributing sensor data from ground level and above the horizon to give Marines and other forces an expanded picture of what’s going on around them, he said.
The ACV C4 UAS is a candidate for what’s arguably the most important component of the USMC’s Armed Reconnaissance Vehicle program, said Mark Brinkman, BAE Systems’ program manager for ACV design and development.
“As the Marine Corps looks for a replacement for the LAV, they had to pick one variant, the C4 UAS version, to be the first of what could potentially be [a] family of vehicles,” he added.
Small, portable and able to be assembled/launched rapidly from the ACV C4, the fixed-wing Stalker and quadcopter Indago could allow operators to see up to 30 miles beyond the vehicle as part of a suite of “sensors and effectors that will enable the Marines to identify potential targets and threats and observe a large area of the battle space, understand what it is they’re looking at and then act upon it,” Brinkman explained.
Noting their complementary capabilities, Johnson said, “It’s advantageous to be operating both drones simultaneously, thinking about coverages of ranges, real estate and the data each are intended to provide.”
The pair can swap payloads quickly, with a variety of available electro-optical, infrared, and low-light cameras capable of locking onto and tracking targets day and night in all weather conditions. Stalker can fly for up to eight hours with solid oxide fuel cell and battery-powered options, while Indago can fly for a little more than an hour.
Both can take off vertically. Many of the drone users operate them from a ground control station, typically a laptop or a tablet depending on requirements for ruggedness, he said.
“We’re moving toward a common ground control software suite between Stalker and Indago,” Johnson said, adding that the software has an open systems backbone so “it’s portable to almost any hardware instantiation you’re looking for.”
“If [the Marines] want it as part of a more complex control system, controlling a wider selection of unmanned vehicles across multiple domains, we can do that,” he said. “We’re trying to give customers the same experience across a variety of UAVs and ground control stations through that common software.”
Both drones have onboard capability to process the data their sensors scoop up, he said.
“If you think about fusing data, target recognition and a variety of computationally intensive activities, we try to push those out as far as we can to optimize bandwidth,” he said. “The ideal situation is you’re pushing them to the air vehicle.”
That would speed ACV C4 UAS’ distribution of the video and images Stalker and Indago can gather for Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalions and other elements of Marine Air Ground Task Forces, Johnson said, adding that little work remains to make both drones compatible with ACV C4.
Skunk Works is already considering how multiple Stalkers/Indagos could work together. That would give ACV C4 UAS even more quarterback-like chops, he added.
“We’re thinking about how in the future we get multiple Stalkers and Indagos to collaborate in real time using artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he said. “How can we start to introduce more swarming capability?”
Topics: Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Unmanned Air Vehicles, Marine Corps News
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