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13.09.2016

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS IN UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE (UAV) INFRASTRUCTURES

English

   

Part I, Introduction

David Davidian
Adjunct Lecturer
American University of Armenia


September 2015

“Knowledge of the enemy’s disposition can only be obtained from other men.”
Sun Tzu

Collaboration and sharing of data across the command structure continues to be a crucial factor in UAV systems. What was once a simple command console is now challenged by the number of simultaneous, in-theater UAVs, and the enormous increase in telemetrics, especially high quality video and Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) data that must be assimilated and shared for maximizing and optimizing the infrastructure's effectiveness.

Infrastructures initially designed for the control of a single UAV and the data generated are faced with the burden of UAVs in the constant process of being upgraded, yet their ground stations remained relatively unchanged. As design engineers constantly added more and better sensor capabilities to the aircraft, their data centers became overwhelmed. Simply adding more storage and some processing power within limits of the execution architecture only provide incremental relief. The refrain, “data is all over the floor” was, and probably still heard quite often.

Specifically, the ability to extract, consolidate and synthesize metadata from these updated UAVs for future retrieval of HD video, Electro Optical Infra Red (EO-IR), radar, geodetic, etc, data feeds into a reasonably useful database became nearly impossible. Real time video is generally stored, yet in many cases, without the capability of local processing. Post-processing is always delayed, negating much of its tactical usefulness. With multiple UAVs feeding data into an infrastructure, the architecture must be resilient and scalable enough to ingest increasingly vast amount of data, yet able to disseminate crucial actionable information throughout the command structure. In addition, this integrated infrastructure must allow collaboration not only between varied command centers, but must be able to integrate non-UAV sourced real time intelligence into the current solution. In the words of renown Israeli UAV commander, Major Yair, “You have to make life and death calls in seconds” 1 An intercepted cell phone call could weigh heavily on an attack decision.

Decisions not made with the maximum available data and intelligence can be costly. The ability of a UAV infrastructure to maximize data availability and real time collaboration is the key. The result has many of the characteristics of a complex dynamic system, such as:

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS IN UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE (UAV) INFRASTRUCTURES (262 KB)


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