DoD To Set UAV Standards by Summer
Goal: Common Data Links, Ground Control Stations
The U.S. military services are working to create common standards for sending data to and from UAVs in an effort to allow imagery to flow more easily around the battlefield.
The proliferation of unmanned aircraft since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and their growing indispensability has made the difficulties in transmitting their imagery between services ever more frustrating. Last summer, Pentagon acquisition chief John Young set up a task force to look at ways to improve UAV interoperability among the U.S. military services.
In December, the task force recommended that DoD base its standards on Army protocols, said Dyke Weatherington, DoD's deputy director of unmanned warfare, in an e-mailed statement. The task force noted the Army's success in sharing UAV video with vehicles, helicopters and ground stations, and in particular, the work of the anti-roadside-bomb Task Force Odin, Army and DoD officials said.
The task force has completed an initial draft interface specification that will be refined by a series of working groups and is expected to be completed this summer, Weatherington said.
The task force's recommendation arrived about the same time as Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps acquisition officials laid out an interoperability plan that includes speeding up work on common data links and developing standards for ground-control stations that can accept and share data from UAVs across the services, Weatherington said.
"Weatherington is looking for practices to tie us all together," said Tim Owings, deputy project manager for Army unmanned aircraft systems.
Army Efforts
Today's UAVs transmit data in many formats, making it difficult to share still imagery and video between services and sometimes even between units of the same service.
"In what bandwidth are you sending it? In what degree of resolution are you sending it? Different ground stations have different abilities to receive data," said Daniel Gouré, vice president of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank.
In November, Army officials briefed Young on the service's progress on sharing UAV video and getting smaller, innovative vendors involved in acquisition. The presentation may have shaped the recommendation to base the new DoD-wide standards on the Army's approach.
The Army, which had only a handful of UAVs at the beginning of the Iraq war but now has thousands of Hunters, Predators, Ravens and Shadows, has put itself through a crash course in getting various aircraft to share data and video, said Col. Jeffrey Kappenman, the Army Training and Doctrine Command's system manager for unmanned aerial systems.
The Army has developed ways to send UAV video not just to ground stations, but to moving trucks and helicopters as part of L-3 Communications' One System Remote Video Terminal (OSRVT) program. OSRVTs transmit on C-band, Ku-band, L-band and S-band frequencies, the senior Army official said.
The Army is also working on ground stations that can switch from one UAV feed to another.
"A company which can do this will allow you to fly different vehicles and take video from a Shadow and hand it off to a Warrior," Owings said. "This will provide true interoperability for the joint services."
In September, AAI Corp. delivered a prototype Universal Common Ground Station designed to work with virtually any UAV sensor, Owings said. Production copies are to be unveiled in May.
"This is a quantum step forward," Jensen said.
Standard Data Link
DoD is seeking to get all services to use a common data link, Weatherington said. One option is the Tactical Common Data Link (TCDL), which allows point-to-point data transmissions of up to 274 megabits per second, enough to handle full-motion video UAVs, he said. TCDLs use a standard waveform instead of a proprietary one, making it cheaper and easier to communicate across service boundaries.
Army and Air Force officials are already working to fit their larger UAVs with TCDL. The Army's first TCDL-equipped Warriors will arrive in Iraq in July, Kappenman said. The Air Force will install the data links onto Predators and Reapers in 2010 as part of a larger electronic suite called the Predator Primary Data Link, said Col. Eric Mathewson, director of the Air Force Unmanned Aerial System Task Force.
"There is a strong push to field this capability as quickly as possible," Mathewson said.
Ultimately, he said, TCDLs will be installed on all military UAVs weighing more than 30 pounds and communicate with any computer or video screen connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Router network.
Meetings are under way to hash out the exact protocols for data transfer, messaging and ways to assign each ground station and UAV its own IP address, one senior Army official said.
"There are a lot of subcomponents to TCDL, meaning you can be on a certain frequency and still not be able to talk. You need to make sure that all of the subcomponents, specifications and characteristics of TCDL are defined so that you can fully communicate," the official said.
Pan-Service Efforts
Meanwhile, the Army, Air Force and Navy have already been working to improve UAV interoperability, which requires thinking about software, engineering, data links and ground control stations.
For example, a general-officer executive steering group was created in April to establish common acquisition practices and procedures between the Air Force's Predator and the Army's Warrior, including "developing common contract vehicles, common sensor, payload acquisition and interoperability initiatives," Weatherington said.
Moreover, the services are already meeting to lay out a general approach to UAV interoperability.
"The Navy has come down here and gone over this with us and the Air Force in Huntsville, Ala. We can use different UAS systems on the same ground control system," Col. Jennifer Jensen, common systems integrator production manager, said.
The senior Army official said the services were talking about integrating feeds from the Air Force Predator, Navy Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) systems and Army Warrior.
Jensen said implementation will take some work.
The Air Force's ISR chief, Lt. Gen. David Deptula, said his service welcomes the Pentagon plan to increase UAV interoperability.
"There's a lot of benefit to going to common protocols and data links. So, yeah, we're very much in favor of doing that," Deptula said. "We've been at the forefront of wanting to select best of breed, and then move forward with common protocols and linkages." ■
John T. Bennett and Michael Hoffman contributed to this report.
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