Pentagon's Urban Recon Takes Wing
By John Hudson | Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Nov. 29, 2005 PT
A leading defense contractor has successfully demonstrated a system
that lets foot soldiers command unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs,
to see real-time overhead images on their handheld computers while
fighting in urban battle zones.
Individual war fighters can receive video-surveillance data on a
target of interest by moving a cursor over the subject, as part of
a Northrop Grumman system to automate reconnaissance, surveillance
and target acquisition, or RSTA, within urban environments.
UAVs have already proven their worth in the kinds of urban battle
zones that produce daily headlines out of Iraq -- places like
Falluja and Najaf, where the drones can navigate the labyrinth of
streets or stealthily peer into buildings. But ground troops don't
currently have direct access to this surveillance and
reconnaissance data, and they have no control of the aircraft that
deliver it.
That's what HURT, for Heterogeneous Urban RSTA, promises to change.
Northrop demonstrated the system this fall on the former site of
Georgia Air Force Base in Victorville, California, on a grid of
abandoned streets and buildings used to train soldiers in urban
combat.
Two fixed-wing UAVs, a Raven and a Pointer, along with an Rmax
rotorcraft, were put aloft under the control of the system.
Participants on the ground were able to view wide-area surveillance
of the battle zone on handheld monitors, but could also send one of
the UAVs in for a closer look at a suspected enemy position by
merely moving over the subject with their cursor.
For the demo, a soldier observed a distant garage with a van
backing out of it, and selected this target on his handheld screen.
HURT autonomously selected the best UAV for the job based on
location, and dispatched it to "shadow" the van. It also re-tasked
the remaining three aerial units to secure a wide-area
perimeter.
"This is truly the system of systems," said Jim Hart, a spokesman
for Northrop Grumman. "There is a simple interface that allows it
to take just about any kind of ground or air-based sensor platform
into its web."
The elasticity of the HURT concept means that UAVs plugged into the
system don't need any special modification. The system could also
combine ground-based surveillance sensors with airborne platforms,
with the potential to reduce manpower demands and risks to friendly
forces associated with urban operations, according to a report by
Rand.
HURT can also store captured images -- sort of like a battlefield
TiVo -- for playback on demand by any user.
To generate the handheld computer's onscreen virtual cities, urban
landscape models had to be created using 3-D datasets like the ones
used for the high-res images that make Xbox or PlayStation games so
visually compelling.
"We've done applications for both the military and consumer
markets," said David Colleen, CEO of Planet 9 Studios. "We love the
challenge of field applications like this, because they're so much
more complex."
HURT is presently concerned only with intelligence gathering, but
its versatility means it has the future potential to be used in
offensive roles, like coordinating UAVs with tactical-strike
capabilities, such as the RQ-1 Predator.
Industry leaders such as Honeywell and AeroVironment are developing
micro-UAVs that can loiter in the air and stare in windows, and
larger "payload agnostic" units that could play a more offensive
role, such as target designation for laser-guided munitions.
Off the battlefield, HURT might one day extend the reach of U.S.
homeland-security agencies, providing an airborne surveillance
platform equipped with biometric imaging capability and other
antiterrorism hardware.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection units could adapt the technology
to use networks of ground-based sensors and UAVs equipped with
synthetic aperture radar along the border, said Hart.
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