Landing intelligence

But it is not only this autonomous landing technology that has been recognised as being highly innovative. BAE Systems also boasts a pioneering facility where its mission systems are tested using UAVs that fly in civil airspace.

BAE Systems Australia has become the global company’s centre of excellence for autonomous technologies and is tasked with developing the navigation, guidance and control systems for unmanned vehicles in the air, land and sea domains. Platforms such as the Taranis combat UAV and the Mantis medium-altitude long-endurance UAV are designed and built in the UK, but the autonomous mission systems that control them are developed in Australia.

The company’s engineering team based in Melbourne developed the Kingfisher II as a test and demonstration platform for its autonomous technologies. The small UAV is operated out of the company’s facility at West Sale Aerodrome in Victoria.

BAE Systems has three Kingfisher UAVs that can be used as technology testbeds, with at least one in an airworthy state at any given time to enable continuous testing. Once technologies have been proved on the Kingfishers in flight trials conducted by the UAV flight operations centre at West Sale, the new systems can be integrated with larger platforms like Taranis and Mantis.

“[Kingfisher] is really built as a platform to hold experiments, so it is essentially a computer rack system with a rounded nose and flat-panel sides so that we can cut holes in the sides and put sensors in,” explained Brad Yelland, BAE Systems Australia’s head of strategy and business development for aerospace.

“We can put antennas in; we can stack up processors inside the aircraft that hold our software for the autonomous technologies. And then when we have finished one experiment we can take out all those processors and sensors and communications systems and put in new ones with minimal cost. We can pretty much change the configuration of the system to do multiple flights in one day. ” Speaking at the Avalon Airshow, Yelland described how the development of BAE Systems Australia’s award-winning Intelligent Recovery System began about a decade ago. The company’s engineers started by considering how UAVs were managing to land, usually either through remote piloting or by using infrastructure on the ground to guide them in.

To remove the need for prepositioned infrastructure, the company began working on a GPS-based landing system. A survey of a given landing strip is carried out, the GPS information is provided to the UAV and the aircraft lands itself. This GPS-based landing capability has already been integrated with Taranis.

But what about a military platform operating in a GPS-denied environment? What if a UAV flying in civil airspace suddenly has to make an emergency landing in an unexpected location? The solution is an imagery-based system that replaces the need for GPS data by using visual cues picked up by the aircraft’s sensors.

“Now we have got UAVs that can fly around, they can look for a runway, they can pick out straight edges, they can work out how long the runway is, work out the corners, they can look for obstacles on the runway. . . and they can work out the best way to land and then autonomously bring themselves into land,” said Yelland.

He pointed out that because the system uses visual cues, UAVs equipped with this technology could just as easily land on moving runways. The system can also be integrated with manned platforms and used, for example, as an autonomous aid for pilots landing on aircraft carriers, thereby helping to reduce training costs for air forces coping with funding cuts.

“We are looking for other markets,” said Yelland. “We have been speaking with the Office of Naval Research in the US about using it to land aircraft on aircraft carriers. We have been talking to big companies like Northrop Grumman and General Atomics. . . they are all very interested in what we have got. We think there is huge potential. ” In terms of feeding technological breakthroughs into the wider company’s UAV platforms, BAE Systems Australia combines two approaches. The first is fulfilling specific design requests from the UK, as engineers are currently doing for Taranis. The second approach is to concentrate research efforts outside the framework of a specific project, developing new technologies to a level of maturity where they can be offered as potential additional capabilities for existing programs.

The company is currently focusing its research efforts on simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) technologies with the aim of providing UAVs with a capability that enables accurate navigation in the absence of GPS signals. The aircraft constantly monitors features on the ground and measures its position relative to them, building up a map and navigating using that map at the same time. This process is at the heart of the autonomous landing system.

“The SLAM technology is still in prototype stage,” said Yelland. “We have proven it in our Kingfisher, we have done lots of demonstrations of it and we are in the process now of understanding what we would need to do in order to integrate it into other platforms that BAE Systems produces. ” The company is allowed to fly its testbed UAVs within defined limits around the West Sale airfield without having to apply for special permission each time. This gives BAE Systems continuous access to airspace shared with a mix of commercial and general aviation users, as well as traffic coming in and out of RAAF Base East Sale. Kingfisher UAV flights are constrained to operating within a radius of 10 nautical miles of the airstrip up to an altitude of 15,000ft.

“We have managed to develop a good operational process to integrate our UAVs into the airspace with other aircraft, and that is unique not only in Australia but that is pretty much unique in the world,” said Yelland.

“Whenever we contact the airspace authorities to let them know over the next month we are going to be doing a series of flights of UAVs they put out a Notice to Airmen to notify anyone flying into that region that there will be UAVs flying around. And then, whenever we are flying UAVs, we have our operators who are specially trained. . . and we have got constant communications with air traffic control. ” Questioned about whether there have been any notable safety incidents involving UAVs flying out of West Sale, Yelland described an occasion when the pilot of a light aircraft did not obey ATC instructions to allow a UAV to land ahead of him.

“When it became obvious to us that he was going to land his plane regardless, we aborted our landing,” he said. “[After landing] we explained that our aircraft had no pilot and that if there was an accident as a result of his delinquent actions then the only life at risk was his. He went visibly pale and ended up thanking us for our actions. ” BAE Systems had to introduce certain technical capabilities to cope with the specific conditions at West Sale, including a capability that allows operators to rapidly redirect their UAVs in the event that an air ambulance needs to use the runway in an emergency.

Despite safeguards such as this and triply redundant systems that are built to full airworthiness standards, public opinion continues to lag behind autonomous technology, according to Yelland. “By far the biggest hurdle that we have got to flying UAVs in [civil] airspace is public perception of safety,” he said.

“That is why the approach we have taken with West Sale is a sort of a crawl before you walk before you run approach. We are flying our UAVs, getting air traffic control comfortable with what we are doing, getting the military comfortable with what we are doing, getting the general airspace users comfortable with what we are doing. . . before we then expand it out into other areas. ” But while he is confident that autonomous technology is already mature enough to allow UAVs to fly safely in shared airspace, Yelland believes that moves to extend unmanned operations in Australia have been hindered by a reluctance to formalise plans for the ADF to acquire highly capable platforms such as Global Hawk/Triton or Predator/Reaper.

A long-awaited government announcement on this matter would certainly help to reignite public debate.

We have managed to develop a good operational process to integrate our UAVs into the airspace with other aircraft.