AAI Corporation, an operating unit of Textron Systems, successfully demonstrated several new technologies for command-and-control of unmanned air and ground vehicles during the first week of August at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. These technologies were designed and developed in conjunction with the U.S. Navy Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City and the U.S. Army’s unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) Program Office to support NATO interoperability standards. The demo included a new ground control station (GCS) based on the U.S. Army’s One System® GCS, which the Army and Marine Corps use to operate the Shadow® 200 aircraft in theater. This new GCS is compliant with NATO standardization agreement (STANAG) 4586, translating information from unmanned vehciles into standardized message formats that can be shared with other systems. Likewise, information can be transferred back into vehicle-specific messaging formats for seamless interoperability. A separate vehicle-specific module (VSM) provides vehicle-unique control messages to the unmanned system being operated, whether a ground, sea or air platform. AAI’s STANAG 4586 GCS architecture also provides a common user interface that can dynamically configure to the type of unmanned system being controlled.

The command-and-control capabilities of the GCS were further expanded to include the integration of QinetiQ North America’s TALON® robot. AAI and QinetiQ North America successfully demonstrated a STANAG 4586-to-JAUS (Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems) translator designed to support the TALON robot. This also allows video to be transmitted from Talon to AAI’s One System Remote Video Terminal (OSRVT). AAI currently is working with QinetiQ North America’s Technology solutions Group in Waltham, Massachusetts, to integrate OSRVT capabilities into the TALON’s controller, which is expected to provide TALON operators even greater situational awareness from data provided by the UAS overhead.