Raytheon Company has developed an advanced common ground control system (CGCS), and is proposing the system as ‘unsolicited proposal’ for use by the U.S. Air Force’s Predator UAV units, promising a ‘dramatic improvement’ in the efficiency of man-machine interface, related to the operation of unmanned aircraft systems. Raytheon is offering the system to the Air National Guard, to improve the Predator operations centers currently being fielded. (more details on Raytheon’s CGCS) Further improvements were recently demonstrated to the US Army and Navy, operating the ‘One System’ Ground Control System supporting the Shadow-200 and Hunter and new Sky warrior UAVs.
The new One System’ fully supports NATO standardization agreement (STANAG) 4586, translating information from unmanned vehicles 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. Furter exploiting the potential interoperability, AAI and QinetiQ North America are cooperating in an effort to integrate integrate the control of unmanned aerial and ground systems (UAS/UGV) in a single ground control station (GCS), based on AAI’s One System, which is already used by the US Army and Marine Corps for the control of a number of UAS.
In the demonstration held last month, the two companies presented the potential benefits of such integration in a recent demonstration, where imagery collected by a Shadow 200 flying overhead was displayed to the TALON’s controller, offering greater situational awareness from data provided by the UAS overhead. (more details on the STANAG 4586 One System GCS)
