Tag: BAE Systems

Death TV: Overwhelmed and bored analysts recommending drone strikes

Chris Cole

The Washington Post reported this week that vast amount of video footage from drones are overwhelming analysts. 

According to Marine Corps General James Cartwright, Vice Chair of the Military Joint Chiefs of Staff, the video is “boring intelligence analysts to tears.”

Forced to watch what Gen. Cartwright called “Death TV,” bleary-eyed analysts at ground stations and other outposts spend hours wading through useless data until they spot signs of a target and recommend that the drone fire its missile.

Cartwright wants (yes, you’ve guessed it) more autonomy and technology to solve the problem and companies are lining up to provide the technology to process the video feed.  “Within three years, it will be technically feasible to run these sophisticated algorithms and extract relevant essence data from the content” according to John Delay of Harris Corp which has, according to the article, several defense contracts, but also has also made transmitters for broadcast television since 1969. (Death TV indeed!)

Unfortunately for the analysts, and without doubt Afghans too, Aviation Week says that Gorgon Stare will enter service aboard US Reaper drones in Afghanistan  next month   Gorgon Stare is a new surveillance capability that allows a wide area of ground to be videoed  while also enabling individuals to be tracked within that wide area. As Aviation Week explains:

‘The five EO cameras each shoot two 16-megapixel frames/sec., which are stitched together by the computer to create an 80-megapixel image…. The result is a system that offers a “many orders of magnitude” leap beyond the “soda straw” view provided by the single EO/IR camera carried by an MQ-1 Predator or a conventional Reaper UAV…. The video taken by Gorgon Stare’s cameras can be “chipped out” into 10 individual views and streamed to that many recipients or more… At the same time, Gorgon Stare will process the images from all its cameras in flight, quilting them into a mosaic for a single wide-area view.’

Four sets of Gorgons will enter service next month as part of the initial deployment.  A further developed version, involving BAE Systems’ ARGUS system [see ‘our Outstaring the Gorgon: BAE, Drones and ARGUS] is already being developed and tested.

Meanwhile the US Army has announced plans to conduct the largest ever demonstration of interoperability between manned and unmanned systems next year with the aim of proving that MUSIC (Manned Unmanned Systems Integration Concept) can work. As previously mentioned there is enormous pressure on political and civil authorities to allow unmanned aerial vehicles to operate within civil airspace and MUSIC is another step in that direction.   However Drone Wars UK can’t help but point out, as yet another drone crashes, that unmanned systems continue to regularly fall out of the sky.

BAE’s Demon Drone Flies With Help of Ten British Universities

Chris Cole
Demon's First Flight - September 2010

Ten British universities have been working with BAE Systems on a new unmanned experimental drone system called Demon.  Demon, which uses small air jets to manuever rather than conventual mechanical flaps, has been developed under the £6.2m FLAVIIR programme.   Demon, had its  first flight in mid September  from Walney Island Airport, a small airport owned by BAE Systems on an island off the Cumbrian coast.  Demon has been built by BAE Systems in association with the following universities:  Cranfield, Imperial College, Warwick, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Southampton, Swansea, and York.  Demon will now undergo a two-years test and development programme.

Meanwhile BAE Systems has been awarded a $4m contract from the USAF for ‘engineering, training, and other services’ for the company’s Silver Fox UAV.   Silver Fox is a small drone used for intnellegence and surveillance purposes.   This contract is vital to supporting the warfighter,” said Gordon Eldridge, acting vice president and general manager of aerospace solutions at BAE Systems.

In March 2009, BAE bought Advanced Ceramic Systems, the company that US company that developed the Silver Fox and Coyote drones, for $15m.

Out Staring The Gorgon: BAE, Drones and ARGUS

Chris Cole
ARGUS -IS sensor (BAE Systems)

Last week,  BAE Systems quietly announced that it had won a $50m contract to further develop the ARGUS  system in conjunction with U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA ).   ARGUS (or Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance) provides real-time, high-resolution, video surveillance capability for U.S. combat forces for detecting, locating, tracking and monitoring events on battlefields.  It is being designed to be used with drones or small manned aircraft.

This latest contract, to develop an infrared capability for ARGUS so that it can be used at nightime, come a few months after few months after BAE Systems admitted that ARGUS had been successfully tested by DARPA in Autumn 2009.

In a helpful article, ARES explains that ARGUS

“is designed to overcome the narrow “soda-straw” field of view of conventional surveillance sensors by providing multiple real-time video streams ….   DARPA says ARGUS can provide up to 65 “Predator-class” steerable video streams.  The 1.8-gigapixel sensor has four optical telescopes, each with 92 5-megapixel focal-plane arrays – cellphone camera chips, says BAE. The airborne processor combines the video output from all 368 arrays together to create a single mosaic image, with an update rate of 12-15 frames a second.

On the ground, the operator can create windows around stationary or moving targets within the image and ARGUS will down-link the video for these windows in real time. The system provides up to 65 640 x 480-pixel video streams simultaneously, limited only by data link capacity. Also a “global motion detector” mode looks at the entire image and tags potential targets with low-res image “chips”.

ARGUS in Operation (image Wired.com)

In other words, one drone will be able to track, in real time, up to 65 targets and as Wired.com suggests, monitor them over and area of 65 miles.

With up to 65 simultaneous video streams ARGUS easily beats the famously named ‘Gorgon Stare’ which was being developed to have 12 video streams.

ARES has also posted some fascinating images of what ARGUS is capable of doing.

The old adage “you can run, but you can’t hide” is becoming more true than ever, and real-time surveillance of huge swathes of territory using drones seems to be just over the horizon.

Taranis: New drone, same old protesters!

Chris Cole

Yesterday, as BAE systems unveiled Taranis, their new unmanned combat drone technical demonstrator at their factory in Warton, near Preston we held a small protest vigil at the front gates.  According to Defence Minister Gerald Howarth speaking at the event, the combat drone “reflects the best of our nation’s advanced design and technology skills.” 

There was some grumbling amongst those present that details were scant and  and Taranis could only viewed at some distance. Indeed the drone, which was supposed to be flying this year, is already a year late.   At a cost of £143 million the demonstrator, as the Daily Mail puts it, “spearheads BAE’s drive to convince the Ministry of Defence to invest in the next generation of unmanned aircraft.”

Taranis, named after the Celtic god of thunder, is different from the UK’s current drones as it is designed not to be flown remotely from the ground via satellite, as current unmanned drones are, but rather programmed pre-flight  to carry out its mission, whether  intelligence, surveillance or armed strike.   To make the aircraft ‘more stealthy’ i.e. invisisible to radar, the drone’s bombs and missiles are carried internally.

The company and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) are at pains to point our that the ‘robotic drone’ will absolutely always be in human control.   The military are concerned that the public have the wrong attitude to drones and are planning to go to considerable length to re-educate us.  Speaking following objections to the allowing of drones to be flown at Salisbury Plain,  Lt Cdr Gerry Corbett said

 “”The public perception is either: they’re spying on us; they’re shooting at us; or they’re not safe.  We are trying to get rid of the phrase UAV. They are aircraft and they are piloted, albeit remotely.” 

Speaking up on behalf of the ‘un-reeducated’ we held a small vigil at the gates calling on BAE to work for peace and not war.  Response from the hundreds of workers we saw was mostly friendly with our banner,  ‘The only good drone is a vuvuzela – Stop Taranis’ raising smiles.

News on BAE’s drones

Chris Cole
Artist impression of Taranis

BAE’s Mantis drone has returned to the UK following a series of tests at an Australian military test range according to a report in Flight International.    “BAE says a production version of Mantis would be able to fly at altitudes up to 50,000ft and deliver an endurance of over 36h. The design is a potential candidate for the UK Ministry of Defence’s Scavenger requirement, which seeks a persistent intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance capability to enter use from around 2015 to 2018.

The Flight article also reveals that BAE’s “combat drone”  in development, Taranis,  is to be unveiled at a special ceremony at BAE’s Warton factory on Monday July 12th.  The seems likely to co-incide with a military industry conference on ‘weaponised’ unmanned drones due to take place in London on 13/14th July.

Surveillance drones in the UK?

Chris Cole

Speaking about armed drones to a group in Essex  last night I was asked about the use of drones to spy on people in the UK.  I get this question regularly since the Guardian reported in January that a number of police forces are working with BAE Systems in a Home Office backed project to develop a national drone plan. 

Currently the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) does not allow unmanned drones to be flown in UK airspace with the exception of certain military test sites.   When Merseyside police jumped the gun and used a drone to track a stolen car, they were threatened with prosecution by the CAA  and had to promise not to use drones again.    (I have been told that drones have been sighted at various demos but presumably after the high-profile rebuke of Merseyside police this is not happening now).

It is not just the UK that does not allow unmanned drones to be flown in civil airspace for safety reasons .  Frustrated by this, the military industry has been working on ways to put pressure civil aviation authorities.   The latest  bit of pressure is a ‘year long study by 23 European military companies’ into how manned and unmanned aircraft can fly together.  Flight Magazine reports:  

“One of the major issues at the heart of UAS development today is the integration of these vehicles into civil airspace. We need to ensure proper segregation of existing air traffic and maintain a high level of safety for all airspace users to the standards of international civil aviation,” says Pierre-Eric Pommellet, Thales senior vice-president in charge of defence mission systems.   While calling the SIGAT findings “decisive” and “a major outcome for European defence ministries” considering the technical and regulatory aspects of operating manned and unmanned aircraft in the same airspace, no details on the findings were released.

In my experience the military industry usually gets what it  want.  Whilst the CAA holds the upper hand at the moment, I suspect that over the next few year, in particular in the run up to the 2012 Olympics,  there will be increasing pressure to allow drones to undertake surveillance work in UK airspace.

Meanwhile, as I am beginning to regular say at the end of these posts, there has been another drone stike in Pakistan.

PS –  The existing six-mile training area aound Parc Aberporth in Wales to be extended.