Tuesday, March 20, 2007 3:23:00 PM
Popular Mechanics -- Civilian UAVs: No Pilot, No Problem
You probably haven't yet seen a robot plane overhead, but more are flying all the time. With endurance measured in days instead of hours and applications from law enforcement to hurricane hunting, civilian UAVs are ready to take off.
A Customs and Border Protection Predator B UAV sits on the runway. (Photograph by Ofer Wolberger).
By Jeff Wise
Published in the April 2007 issue of Popular Mechanics
At twilight on a clear November evening, CBP-104 rolls onto the tarmac at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., revs its 900-hp turboprop engine and takes off into the ruby desert sky. Banking left, it straightens and climbs on a southerly heading, leveling off at 19,000 ft. For the next few hours, CBP-104 will patrol a 30-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, its video and infrared cameras trained on the rugged landscape below.
In some ways it's a normal border patrol flight, much like the hundreds conducted every day by Custom and Border Protection (CBP), which maintains a fleet of 243 aircraft. But this one is different from most in one important way: CBP-104 has no pilot on board. The plane is a Predator B, a sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). UAVs have been part of the U.S. military arsenal for two decades. While they see extensive service in the Middle East — they currently account for an astonishing 80 percent of all flights over Iraq — here at home they have a much lower profile.
As CBP-104 drones on through the darkness, an infrared camera mounted in the circular turret beneath its nose scans the Arizona desert. The image is beamed via microwave link to a ground control station at Fort Huachuca. Inside, an employee of the aircraft's manufacturer, San Diego-based General Atomics, monitors the flight while a colleague watches the surveillance feed, panning and sluing the infrared camera with a joystick.
A few yards away, CBP agent Dave Gasho sits in the mission control trailer, monitoring the video feed. For 3 hours, long, slow pans over the sagebrush and cactus yield no suspicious activity. Then a call comes over the radio: The border patrol station at Sonoita, Ariz., is reporting that something triggered a seismic sensor buried just north of the border. Gasho directs the Predator team to investigate. It doesn't take long to find what set off the alarm: Five men, their warm bodies white against the cooler gray of the desert, are trudging north through the rolling countryside. The video image is so sharp that even from an altitude of more than 3 miles, Gasho can make out that the men are carrying large, heavy backpacks. Smugglers.
Gasho radios CBP pilot Rich Rouviere, who is patrolling the area in a Black Hawk helicopter with a team of border agents. Rouviere enters the smugglers' coordinates into his GPS and banks hard toward his quarry. Two miles out, he radios the Predator team and asks them to turn on the UAV's laser illuminator. Through Rouviere's night vision goggles, the infrared beam is spotlight bright. Hearing the approaching Black Hawk, the smugglers hide under a ridgetop tree, unaware that aeronautics, robotics and night vision tech have rendered them as conspicuous as if they were huddling on the 50-yard line at the Super Bowl.
When Rouviere sets his helicopter down beside the tree, the border patrol agents jump out and cuff one smuggler. The rest run, but the agents grab three after a short chase. Meanwhile, the Predator B tracks the escapee, shining the laser designator on him as he tries to hide under a tree a quarter-mile away. Thirteen minutes after the Black Hawk touches down, all five suspects are in custody, along with 160 pounds of marijuana. "The whole sequence was a slam-dunk," Rouviere says. "It doesn't get any better than that."
You probably haven't yet seen a robot plane overhead. But more are flying all the time, and their promise is such that, like computers, they could move beyond commonplace to ubiquitous. "Technology is not the limitation," says Rich O'Lear, vice president for Unmanned Aerial Systems at Lockheed Martin. "It's the ability of people to conceive of ways to use the technology."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4213467.html
Civilian UAVs have already demonstrated potential in a wide variety of missions. In 2005 researchers at the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration flew a 6-ft.-long Aerosonde into the heart of tropical storm Ophelia. Such flights are currently conducted by piloted transport planes at a relatively safe altitude of 10,000 ft. But because a UAV puts no crew at risk, the Aerosonde can be flown a few hundred feet above water, where winds whip at 175 mph and waves can top 60 ft. "It gets us to an area that's very difficult to observe with manned aircraft, because of the danger," says Joe Cione, the project's lead scientist.
The U.S. forest service is also exploring UAV technology. This past October, in conjunction with NASA, it flew a modified Predator B, known as the Altair, over a 40,200-acre fire near Palm Springs, Calif. For 16 hours the aircraft, which is lighter than the military version and has a longer wingspan, circled at 43,000 ft., beaming down images that allowed the fire management team to pinpoint the perimeter of a dangerous blaze that killed five firefighters. "A manned flight has to terminate when a pilot gets thirsty, or sleepy or has to use the bathroom," says Frank Cutler, project manager of NASA's Earth Science Capability Demonstration Project. "Our UAV can fly a whole day-night cycle. That will go a long way toward helping the forest service understand the science of these giant fires."
One demonstration project deployed the Altair to identify coffee fields in Hawaii that were ripe for picking. Another used the craft to make a census of seals and sea lions on California's Channel Islands. The U.S. Coast Guard has tested the Bell Eagle Eye TR916, which takes off vertically with two rotors that then pivot forward for horizontal flight, as a ship-based search-and-rescue platform. And every Monday for six of the past eight years, the city of Tucson, Ariz., has used a 12-ft.-long Yamaha RMAX pilotless helicopter to spray wetlands for mosquito control.
REMOTE PATROL: A Predator B at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., is prepped for action in the skies over the U.S.-Mexico border. Designed for the military, the plane is one of a growing number of unmanned aircraft tapped for civilian work. (Photograph by Jason Fulford).
Despite all this civilian UAV potential, the operation of unmanned craft is tightly restricted in the United States. For starters, they can operate only within blocked-out zones of airspace, off-limits to civilian aircraft, known as Restricted Areas. (The area over Fort Huachuca measures 24 by 44 miles — the Predator is confined within that sector like a pit bull inside a chain-link fence. If you're going to try to sneak into the United States, this is not a good place to be.) In some cases, government agencies can apply for a Certificate of Authorization, which allows them to operate a UAV under certain conditions — only from a certain airfield, for instance, or within a certain area, at a certain range of altitudes. Private operators can apply for Experimental Airworthiness Certificates, which carry similar restrictions.
UAV manufacturers want the Federal Aviation Administration to come up with new rules for the National Airspace System that would make room for pilotless aircraft. The FAA, though, is not so eager to oblige. "We are interested in accommodating the needs of unmanned aircraft, but we're not going to compromise safety in order to do that," says Nick Sabatini, the FAA's associate administrator for aviation safety. "We have a fundamental belief that starts with this: First, do no harm. We have a [manned aircraft] system that has evolved over many years. We have 100 years of experience. And that is why our system is so incredibly safe."
The main concern is midair collisions. Currently, human pilots are responsible for looking out the cockpit window to make sure they're not about to collide with anyone, a doctrine called "see and avoid." Last October, Northrop Grumman started testing the UAV equivalent: a system that uses video cameras and sophisticated image processing software to hunt for incoming aircraft. Once a target is detected, the UAV would carry out evasive maneuvers. "Think of the DARPA Grand Challenge, where vehicles are driving autonomously through the desert," says Robert Miller, Northrop Grumman's director of Advanced Concept Development. "We're trying to use those same kinds of machine-vision algorithms to enable UAVs to see other aircraft and avoid them."
Before such a system ushers UAVs into widespread use, however, the FAA will need to be convinced of its reliability. "An unmanned aircraft is going to have to be capable of the same thing that a manned aircraft is capable of," says the FAA's Sabatini. "That technology is probably not going to be available any sooner than 2011." Most likely, he says, it will take much longer than that.
Potential UAV users, though, are impatient to deploy their planes. Last spring, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department invited reporters to the debut of its micro UAV, the SkySeer, which is launched by hand and can be folded to fit in a police cruiser. Operating at an altitude of 250 ft., the SkySeer can circle for more than an hour with an electric motor that's virtually inaudible from the ground. SWAT teams, for instance, could use the SkySeer to scope out a suspect's backyard before they crash through the front door.
The sheriff's department, however, failed to file the correct paperwork with the FAA for permission to fly the SkySeer. The next day, after TV and newspaper reporters filed their stories, the FAA fired off a letter of rebuke. "Some paperwork has to be done," says project manager Cmdr. Sid Heal. "That's what's holding us up." He hopes to conduct field trials this autumn.
Small machines like the SkySeer could presage future UAVs so tiny that they redefine the concept of aircraft. Lockheed Martin is developing a maple-seed-shaped UAV that weighs just a third of an ounce. At the other end of the scale are giants like the Global Observer, with a 50-ft. wingspan, which can use solar power and hydrogen cells to stay aloft for up to a week.
The Arizona sky is still velvety black as the flashing strobe and red navigation light of CBP-104 appear in the distance. It's been a fairly quiet night for the Predator: In addition to the drug smugglers, the aircraft assisted in rounding up a group of 12 would-be illegal immigrants. "Some nights," says Pete McNall, deputy director of CBP's UAV operation in the Southwest, "it's nonstop." The program has been so successful that three more Predator B's will be added to the Southwest fleet, and the operation expanded to the U.S.-Canada border and the Gulf Coast.
Drawing near, CBP-104 descends, levels out and touches down. With that landing, the skies over the United States are again free of unmanned aircraft — a state of affairs that's destined to become increasingly rare in the years ahead. The age of the robot planes has begun. Soon, it will be hard to imagine how we ever lived without them.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4213464.html
You probably haven't yet seen a robot plane overhead, but more are flying all the time. With endurance measured in days instead of hours and applications from law enforcement to hurricane hunting, civilian UAVs are ready to take off.
A Customs and Border Protection Predator B UAV sits on the runway. (Photograph by Ofer Wolberger).
By Jeff Wise
Published in the April 2007 issue of Popular Mechanics
At twilight on a clear November evening, CBP-104 rolls onto the tarmac at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., revs its 900-hp turboprop engine and takes off into the ruby desert sky. Banking left, it straightens and climbs on a southerly heading, leveling off at 19,000 ft. For the next few hours, CBP-104 will patrol a 30-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, its video and infrared cameras trained on the rugged landscape below.
In some ways it's a normal border patrol flight, much like the hundreds conducted every day by Custom and Border Protection (CBP), which maintains a fleet of 243 aircraft. But this one is different from most in one important way: CBP-104 has no pilot on board. The plane is a Predator B, a sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). UAVs have been part of the U.S. military arsenal for two decades. While they see extensive service in the Middle East — they currently account for an astonishing 80 percent of all flights over Iraq — here at home they have a much lower profile.
As CBP-104 drones on through the darkness, an infrared camera mounted in the circular turret beneath its nose scans the Arizona desert. The image is beamed via microwave link to a ground control station at Fort Huachuca. Inside, an employee of the aircraft's manufacturer, San Diego-based General Atomics, monitors the flight while a colleague watches the surveillance feed, panning and sluing the infrared camera with a joystick.
A few yards away, CBP agent Dave Gasho sits in the mission control trailer, monitoring the video feed. For 3 hours, long, slow pans over the sagebrush and cactus yield no suspicious activity. Then a call comes over the radio: The border patrol station at Sonoita, Ariz., is reporting that something triggered a seismic sensor buried just north of the border. Gasho directs the Predator team to investigate. It doesn't take long to find what set off the alarm: Five men, their warm bodies white against the cooler gray of the desert, are trudging north through the rolling countryside. The video image is so sharp that even from an altitude of more than 3 miles, Gasho can make out that the men are carrying large, heavy backpacks. Smugglers.
Gasho radios CBP pilot Rich Rouviere, who is patrolling the area in a Black Hawk helicopter with a team of border agents. Rouviere enters the smugglers' coordinates into his GPS and banks hard toward his quarry. Two miles out, he radios the Predator team and asks them to turn on the UAV's laser illuminator. Through Rouviere's night vision goggles, the infrared beam is spotlight bright. Hearing the approaching Black Hawk, the smugglers hide under a ridgetop tree, unaware that aeronautics, robotics and night vision tech have rendered them as conspicuous as if they were huddling on the 50-yard line at the Super Bowl.
When Rouviere sets his helicopter down beside the tree, the border patrol agents jump out and cuff one smuggler. The rest run, but the agents grab three after a short chase. Meanwhile, the Predator B tracks the escapee, shining the laser designator on him as he tries to hide under a tree a quarter-mile away. Thirteen minutes after the Black Hawk touches down, all five suspects are in custody, along with 160 pounds of marijuana. "The whole sequence was a slam-dunk," Rouviere says. "It doesn't get any better than that."
You probably haven't yet seen a robot plane overhead. But more are flying all the time, and their promise is such that, like computers, they could move beyond commonplace to ubiquitous. "Technology is not the limitation," says Rich O'Lear, vice president for Unmanned Aerial Systems at Lockheed Martin. "It's the ability of people to conceive of ways to use the technology."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4213467.html
Civilian UAVs have already demonstrated potential in a wide variety of missions. In 2005 researchers at the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration flew a 6-ft.-long Aerosonde into the heart of tropical storm Ophelia. Such flights are currently conducted by piloted transport planes at a relatively safe altitude of 10,000 ft. But because a UAV puts no crew at risk, the Aerosonde can be flown a few hundred feet above water, where winds whip at 175 mph and waves can top 60 ft. "It gets us to an area that's very difficult to observe with manned aircraft, because of the danger," says Joe Cione, the project's lead scientist.
The U.S. forest service is also exploring UAV technology. This past October, in conjunction with NASA, it flew a modified Predator B, known as the Altair, over a 40,200-acre fire near Palm Springs, Calif. For 16 hours the aircraft, which is lighter than the military version and has a longer wingspan, circled at 43,000 ft., beaming down images that allowed the fire management team to pinpoint the perimeter of a dangerous blaze that killed five firefighters. "A manned flight has to terminate when a pilot gets thirsty, or sleepy or has to use the bathroom," says Frank Cutler, project manager of NASA's Earth Science Capability Demonstration Project. "Our UAV can fly a whole day-night cycle. That will go a long way toward helping the forest service understand the science of these giant fires."
One demonstration project deployed the Altair to identify coffee fields in Hawaii that were ripe for picking. Another used the craft to make a census of seals and sea lions on California's Channel Islands. The U.S. Coast Guard has tested the Bell Eagle Eye TR916, which takes off vertically with two rotors that then pivot forward for horizontal flight, as a ship-based search-and-rescue platform. And every Monday for six of the past eight years, the city of Tucson, Ariz., has used a 12-ft.-long Yamaha RMAX pilotless helicopter to spray wetlands for mosquito control.
REMOTE PATROL: A Predator B at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., is prepped for action in the skies over the U.S.-Mexico border. Designed for the military, the plane is one of a growing number of unmanned aircraft tapped for civilian work. (Photograph by Jason Fulford).
Despite all this civilian UAV potential, the operation of unmanned craft is tightly restricted in the United States. For starters, they can operate only within blocked-out zones of airspace, off-limits to civilian aircraft, known as Restricted Areas. (The area over Fort Huachuca measures 24 by 44 miles — the Predator is confined within that sector like a pit bull inside a chain-link fence. If you're going to try to sneak into the United States, this is not a good place to be.) In some cases, government agencies can apply for a Certificate of Authorization, which allows them to operate a UAV under certain conditions — only from a certain airfield, for instance, or within a certain area, at a certain range of altitudes. Private operators can apply for Experimental Airworthiness Certificates, which carry similar restrictions.
UAV manufacturers want the Federal Aviation Administration to come up with new rules for the National Airspace System that would make room for pilotless aircraft. The FAA, though, is not so eager to oblige. "We are interested in accommodating the needs of unmanned aircraft, but we're not going to compromise safety in order to do that," says Nick Sabatini, the FAA's associate administrator for aviation safety. "We have a fundamental belief that starts with this: First, do no harm. We have a [manned aircraft] system that has evolved over many years. We have 100 years of experience. And that is why our system is so incredibly safe."
The main concern is midair collisions. Currently, human pilots are responsible for looking out the cockpit window to make sure they're not about to collide with anyone, a doctrine called "see and avoid." Last October, Northrop Grumman started testing the UAV equivalent: a system that uses video cameras and sophisticated image processing software to hunt for incoming aircraft. Once a target is detected, the UAV would carry out evasive maneuvers. "Think of the DARPA Grand Challenge, where vehicles are driving autonomously through the desert," says Robert Miller, Northrop Grumman's director of Advanced Concept Development. "We're trying to use those same kinds of machine-vision algorithms to enable UAVs to see other aircraft and avoid them."
Before such a system ushers UAVs into widespread use, however, the FAA will need to be convinced of its reliability. "An unmanned aircraft is going to have to be capable of the same thing that a manned aircraft is capable of," says the FAA's Sabatini. "That technology is probably not going to be available any sooner than 2011." Most likely, he says, it will take much longer than that.
Potential UAV users, though, are impatient to deploy their planes. Last spring, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department invited reporters to the debut of its micro UAV, the SkySeer, which is launched by hand and can be folded to fit in a police cruiser. Operating at an altitude of 250 ft., the SkySeer can circle for more than an hour with an electric motor that's virtually inaudible from the ground. SWAT teams, for instance, could use the SkySeer to scope out a suspect's backyard before they crash through the front door.
The sheriff's department, however, failed to file the correct paperwork with the FAA for permission to fly the SkySeer. The next day, after TV and newspaper reporters filed their stories, the FAA fired off a letter of rebuke. "Some paperwork has to be done," says project manager Cmdr. Sid Heal. "That's what's holding us up." He hopes to conduct field trials this autumn.
Small machines like the SkySeer could presage future UAVs so tiny that they redefine the concept of aircraft. Lockheed Martin is developing a maple-seed-shaped UAV that weighs just a third of an ounce. At the other end of the scale are giants like the Global Observer, with a 50-ft. wingspan, which can use solar power and hydrogen cells to stay aloft for up to a week.
The Arizona sky is still velvety black as the flashing strobe and red navigation light of CBP-104 appear in the distance. It's been a fairly quiet night for the Predator: In addition to the drug smugglers, the aircraft assisted in rounding up a group of 12 would-be illegal immigrants. "Some nights," says Pete McNall, deputy director of CBP's UAV operation in the Southwest, "it's nonstop." The program has been so successful that three more Predator B's will be added to the Southwest fleet, and the operation expanded to the U.S.-Canada border and the Gulf Coast.
Drawing near, CBP-104 descends, levels out and touches down. With that landing, the skies over the United States are again free of unmanned aircraft — a state of affairs that's destined to become increasingly rare in the years ahead. The age of the robot planes has begun. Soon, it will be hard to imagine how we ever lived without them.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4213464.html
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