UAVs will Enhance Warfighter’s Situational Awareness

UAVs will Enhance Warfighter’s Situational Awareness

CAMP BUNDELA, India (Oct. 16, 2009) – Spc. David Swan, infantryman, Troop B, 2nd Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, "Strykehorse," 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, tosses an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle at Babina, India Oct. 16. Strykehorse Soldiers were showing off the UAV capabilities to the Indian Army as part of Exercise Yudh Abhyas 09. YA09 is a bilateral exercise involving the Armies of India and the United States. The primary goal of the exercise is to develop and expand upon the relationship between the Indian and U.S. Army.

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New UAV-focused projects designed to enhance the warfighter’s situational awareness were presented at the US Naval Air Systems Command’s innovation challenge.

According to mil-embedded.com, two teams participated at the challenge organized at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division in California: URSA and Swarm View.

The Urban Reconnaissance and Situational Awareness (URSA) worked to reduce or entirely eliminate urban combat casualties using a UAV equipped with a camera to gain situational awareness in GPS-denied environments. The UAV then used algorithms to provide the user with a 3-D virtual reality map in real-time.

Michael McConnehey of the URSA team said: “The Innovation Challenge presented an opportunity to try some of our ideas that hadn’t been fully funded and we saw a problem that we thought that we could offer an innovative solution to.”

The Swarm View team built a UAV platform to simulate autonomous swarm coordination using a mesh network to perform object registration within the platforms’ environment. The swarm of UAVs equipped with cameras enables the warfighter to review updated images containing objects of interest and provide information about the distance to that object despite the sensors and the object of interest being in motion in a cluttered environment.

“The main benefit is a hyper-agnostic sensor suite that allows the warfighter to focus their attention on something else while the swarm looks around a predefined area,” says Jeremy Siedschlag from the team. “Ideally, there would be one operator and six drones allowing the user to make better use of their time since a lot of money is spent on labor.”

For future participants, one of the team members suggests to “Take a lot of risks, fail fast, and fail early. When we did our project, we tried several different cameras, onboard processors and frame sizes and ended up getting rid of a lot of them immediately because they didn’t work for us. Be willing to take risks and be willing to fail. The hard part is knowing when you should quit on the areas that are failing, but the challenges are what make you better in your craft.”

The two teams finished their projects within a six-month period and a $25 thousand budget.