Autonomous unmanned air systems

We are pioneers in the development of autonomous unmanned air systems. We employ human centric based design using synthetic environments, hardware in the loop and flight trials.

The aim is to reduce operator interaction and mitigate communication failures by making many of the air vehicle sub-systems largely autonomous. QinetiQ can develop unmanned air systems able to operate with minimal interaction, communicating only where necessary to aid human decision making. Agent based task management with a variable autonomy interface makes this possible.

We can provide autonomous operation to individual or multiple platforms to allow the detailed decision making process to be offloaded from the human operator to groups of unmanned air vehicles in high workload situations. The human need only provide high level goals for the unmanned air systems to achieve and leave them to work out between themselves how to implement the task. A key aspect to this work is the design of the human machine interface which needs to support high level goal oriented commands while ensuring that the operator is adequately engaged in the mission as it unfolds.

Autonomy can be applied to both conventional manned aircraft and unmanned air vehicles. In manned aircraft there are particular applications in respect of dynamically controlling airborne platforms in absolute co-ordinates and also relative to other platforms. For example in positioning an aircraft to land on the deck of a moving sea vessel or manoeuvring an aircraft to rendezvous with a refuelling tanker.

Accurate and reliable determination of the position, attitude and states makes use of a mix of internal and external sensors, such as GPS (Global Positioning System) and INS (Inertial Navigational System), so that we can deliver robust solutions even under GPS jamming conditions. Couple this with an understanding of dynamics, enables the platform to be controlled to provide stable motion and autopilot type functionality to ensure safe operation in all regimes.

Our success in this field has culminated in the Short Take-Off Vertical Landing (STOVL) flight control and guidance system using a mix of system and sensor integration, modelling and geo-referencing.

Our work continues in this area with the QinetiQ Vectored-thrust Aircraft Advanced Control (VAAC) Harrier being used to aid the development of the Short Take-Off, Vertical Landing (STOVL) variant of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). In 2005 this unique aircraft achieved the world's first automatic landing of a STOVL aircraft on the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, a major milestone in the JSF risk reduction programme.