US Army Outlines Current Trends and Hurdles in Implementing the UAS Roadmap

The US Army Roadmap for UAS 2010-2035 details the plans of weaponising and humanising the unmanned systems.

George Gonsalves briefed the attendees of the Military Robotics Conference that was held at London on the trends and roadblocks faced by the army in implementing the roadmap. He is an aviation systems analyst for UAS at the US Army Capabilities Center. He clarified that these systems are considered as enablers only and have not yet been considered for replacing soldiers. He commented that there was no point in having costly aircrafts and sensors in the air when they do not have proper means of using the data for the spirit, for which they are fighting.

Gonsalves explained that for autonomous systems to be successful they need to integrate with the existing systems seamlessly and need to adapt to changing social structures. Humanising these platforms would need the operators to have complete control on the aircraft. Ensuring human control over the unmanned systems is a must to eliminate ethical issues that may arise with certain unmanned systems, which have the ability to kill. Gonsalves stressed the importance of investing in unmanned systems at the earliest in order to ensure that the roadmap is successfully followed. The army currently owns 93 Shadow UAS platforms and intends to increase the number to 102. Each of the combat teams owns one UAS. The army is currently engaged in ‘rewinging’ the shadows so that their endurance increases to nine hours from four hours. Gonsalves stated that the army is finding it difficult to establish an exclusive ground control system for ground robotics as the focus is more on UAS currently. In order to ensure that the ground control systems are also given priority, the army has formed an Unmanned Ground Systems Roadmap. Gonsalves noted that the only ground vehicle they have right now is the SUG-V. Another area where the army is facing implementation issues is in increasing the number of VTOL platforms, due to the additional costs involved.