UAV Tech: From Fight to Flight

Imagine you're at an airport. To get to Terminal E from Terminal A, you must step onto a train and ride it for a few minutes. There is nothing unfamiliar about this – you do not feel uncomfortable, nervous or uneasy about stepping onto this train, aside from the fact that it will be crammed with other passengers. The robotic voice chimes "Now arriving in Terminal E." You step off. It never enters your mind that there was no human being operating that train.

Now imagine the same concept for the aircraft on which you are about to depart. Impossible?

Not quite.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are nothing new to the aviation world. While mainly known for their military reconnaissance assignments, they are also used to put out fires, on rescue missions and for scientific research. Although the military UAV market has boomed in the past decade, UAVs have been around for many years. Soon, they may be entering into the commercial aviation arena, thanks to the foresight and innovative solutions offered by Athena Technologies. Founded in 1998, Athena specializes in integrated navigation systems, flight control, vehicle management, and sensor suites for these incredible aircraft.

Dr. David Vos, co-founder and CEO of Athena Technologies, has been involved in the aviation industry since 1980. His vision for the future is a world in which technology that has enabled aircraft to fly themselves will one day soon augment the manned aviation industry in a safe and beneficial way.

Military Might

UAVs are ideal for the dangerous and dirty tasks in the military. Less costly to build and operate, these planes are suitable for a variety of missions, including gathering intelligence, firing missiles, or delivering supplies. To complete these missions, they must be highly reliable, efficient, and have incredible endurance.

The GuideStar, Athena Technologies' main product line, incorporates a collection of flight control and navigation sensors – including inertial, navigation, and full air-data sensors – into a single package designed to function in harsh environments. The GuideStar line has seen placement in aircraft built by the likes of Lockheed Martin, AAI Corporation, Raytheon, Aurora Flight Sciences, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Alenia, among others. These aircraft are in turn used by The U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, NASA, DARPA, and the U.S. Army.

The U.S. Army's Shadow 200 Tactical UAV, whose main contractor is AAI Corporation, is currently the largest production unmanned aircraft program at the tactical UAV level in the world. Athena essentially provides the entire navigation and "brains" of the Shadow. This includes the computers that do vehicle management, payload and mission management, navigation and flight control, including all the sensors and all the autopilots.

During an emergency, passengers or pilots can activate the Digital Parachute, a concept Athena Technologies hopes to soon incorporate into manned aviation.

"On the Shadow, we replaced 20 lb of ‘stuff' with a 4 lb solution," Vos says. "At the same time, we drove the performance up dramatically for accuracy of flight control and navigation, to the magnitude of a 1,000% improvement."

The solution was the GuideStar flight control and navigation systems. The systems have proven highly reliable under the most extreme conditions, as demonstrated through the Shadow's track record of over 160,000 flight hours in all deployments and training worldwide. The aircraft has the highest success in operations and combat missions of any other tactical UAV.

The Shadow and other UAVs will be moving into an increasing number of roles in all aspect of the military in the coming years. However, they will never replace the role of human military pilots. Instead, they assist in gathering intelligence and enhance capabilities, while reducing the overall costs of military operations.

The Technology

GuideStar, combined with Athena's controls design technology, offer simpler avionics architectures and facilitate easy installation and maintenance. It is essentially a piece of hardware that carries all of Athena's algorithms. The real development was putting the algorithms in place, Vos explains.

Since 2001, when the first GuideStar was designed and became operational, Athena has continued to develop its product line and mature it, adding more capability and higher performance, and tailoring its product range to the various market niches.

The difference in the products is the computer capability on board the aircraft, sensor quality, the types of sensors used, and the amount of IO that can be hooked up to peripheral devices, Vos explains. Functionally, they are equivalent.

"The broad picture for our products is that essentially you hook up an antenna to it, you hook up power to it, and you give it the interface to the control surface actuators on any airplane," Vos says. "And, immediately, you have a complete navigation flight control autopilot system that can automatically take off, automatically fly a mission and automatically land any airplane."

They accomplish this with intellectual property in the domain of landing gear, autopilot design, control walls, and the "Exclamation Technique," which integrates a large number of various types of sensors into a complete solution that an airplane needs in order to be able to fly and navigate. That intellectual property, coupled with the algorithms, are common across all of the product platforms.

"With the algorithms, the control wall, the autopilots and the navigation algorithms, we can leverage very inexpensive components to make a very high-performance solution for the market," Vos notes.

Around 2006, Athena began building relationships to cross over to manned aviation. Their products, without further development, fit very well into manned aviation, according to Vos.

"By leveraging what has been done in the microelectronics industry and our algorithms, we really changed unmanned aviation," Vos says. "And now one of the very exciting steps here is to bring an equally dramatic change to manned aviation."

Unmanned Technology in Manned Airspace

In a transition mirroring a time when people switched from horses to cars, Vos envisions a highly-organized and automated air-traffic age coming about in the next five years. The same way people had to set up automobile traffic patterns and laws will apply to the next step in personal transportation: aircraft.

"The same kind of dramatic revolution is happening in the air. That kind of automatic traffic routing, collision avoidance, traffic management, next generation air traffic solutions that the FAA is also pioneering together with our automation systems, opens a whole new world of personal flight. And that is extremely exciting for us," Vos says.

Athena is now going through FAA certification of their products for the manned aviation market. They started at the beginning of 2007 with the core piece of the sensor suite, which they are currently completing and doing quite well on, according to Vos.

In five years, Vos predicts, everything Athena does – manned and unmanned – will be certified by the FAA and will enable the unmanned market to be flying along side manned aviation in commercial airspace. At the same time, it will bring all the features they've helped the unmanned aviation mature on – the cost benefits, performance benefits and technology – into manned aviation. Vos expects much higher levels of automation in personal travel, very light jets (VLJs), and unmanned aviation flying in commercial airspace with no pilot on board to become mainstream in the next five years or so. That is more of a cultural challenge than a technological challenge, Vos explains. The technology is already there for this to take place.

"We have accomplished thousands and thousands of those landings as well as guidance of the airplane all the way down – from navigation to landing to touch down – and doing that for manned aviation is no different. It's just as easy for us," he says.

In the immediate and long-term future, however, the technology will be used as an assistant to the pilot or backup for the pilot when they are unable to fly. For example, should an aircraft fly into trouble and flip, any passenger on board can hit a "panic button" and activate Athena's digital parachute concept (see page 60), which stabilizes the airplane and automatically contacts Air Traffic Control (ATC) to get an emergency landing cleared at the nearest airport, without anyone on board having to do anything. The digital parachute system is an automatic control system that will accurately land the aircraft on a runway, as opposed to the nearest field with no control. This is also a feature that can help with single-pilot aircraft, should anything happen to that pilot. Passengers would be able to activate the digital parachute and automatically the plane would land safely at an airport.

"The new level of automation, redundancy and reliability on those planes, together with automated traffic management, shifts the whole paradigm of how you can conduct private flights and manage air traffic of the many thousands of airplanes we'd like to see in the sky flown by private pilots, is a complete new domain," Vos says.

UAV technology would also benefit manned aviation with capabilities including automated collision avoidance with terrain, other aircraft and buildings, as well as the ability to prevent hijacking. With this technology, an aircraft can be prevented from leaving its flight plan without air and ground coordination. Dynamic rerouting and preprogramming can also be implemented, automatically sending the aircraft safely to a nearby airport, should an emergency arise.

"The whole aim here is to enable things to be better and safer, and to really augment the way it's currently being handled, and not displace it," Vos explains.

Although it is not uncommon for people to still get butterflies in their stomachs before flight, this technology will hopefully ease their worries as it becomes mainstream within the next few years. From assisting military missions across the globe, to flying the skies in commercial and private aircraft, Athena Technologies' vision and innovative products will continue to change the face of aviation as we know it.