Shadow Test Marks UAS Control Segment’s Flight Debut

Photo courtesy U.S. Army.

 

By Holly Gonzalez 



A recent U.S. Army Shadow unmanned aircraft flight marked a major milestone for the development of the UAS Control Segment (UCS) architecture, which aims to establish common control between Army, Air Force and Navy UAS.



The two-hour flight, conducted 26 June at Redstone Arsenal, Ala., demonstrated the use of a UCS-compliant Bi-Directional Remote Video Terminal to control the Shadow aircraft and its payload. With the hand-held BDRVT, a separate operator on the ground was able to take control of a Shadow aircraft from its operator, direct its movement, control its sensors onboard to be able to see what the aircraft sees, and provide that information to the operator before returning control back to the Shadow operator.



In an operational context, the flight demonstrated that control of a UAS can be transferred to a warfighter, who could use the aircraft and its sensors to provide real-time situational awareness as well as disseminate the information. At the end of its mission, the aircraft could be returned to the control of another operator using a ground control system.



Although the BDRVT has been demonstrated successfully in hardware-in-the-loop simulations, the flight marked the first time these actions have been accomplished in a live flight test.



The test validated the efforts of the UCS Working Group, a open technical society made up of more than 200 organizations across government, industry and academia that was chartered by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics to develop the UCS architecture.



The BDRVT was built by Phoenix, Ariz.-based Kutta Technologies with the close cooperation of Shadow maker AAI Textron, through the Department of Defense’s Small Business Innovation Research program.



The BDRVT uses open message standards, allowing for users to easily control the full-motion video payload on the Shadow with minimal field training. 



It is compliant with the STANAG 4586 level of interoperability 3 mode and the Army Interoperability Profile supervised usage mode. The BDRVT is also developed to the same standard the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration requires for the certification of manned aircraft operating in the National Airspace System.