Small Unmanned Aircraft a Hot Topic at This Year’s AUVSI Show

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8/6/2012

By Stew Magnuson

Small unmanned aerial vehicles are expected to be a big topic of discussion at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International annual North American conference in Las Vegas this week.

Earlier this year, Congress passed Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization legislation that forces the agency to integrate small UAVs into the national airspace and allow them to fly at heights of up to 2,000 feet by May 2014.

There will be several panels from Aug. 7-9 devoted to the integration of UAVs — small and large — into the flight traffic control regime. FAA Acting Administrator Michael Huerta will deliver Tuesday morning a keynote speech, which is certain to address the topic, and there are at least a dozen panels and technical sessions devoted to ensuring that the technology can be safely flown in U.S. skies.

The market for small UAVS, generally defined as weighing 55 pounds and less, is poised to take off, said Bobby Sturgell, former acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, and now vice president of Washington operations for Rockwell Collins.

Excitement in the industry is growing, Sturgell said. Major defense contractors have already been scooping up smaller unmanned systems companies in anticipation of the growing market, and he expected some major announcements to come out of the show.

The buzz is growing because the potential market is huge, he said. The use of the unpiloted aircraft in recent wars, and their applications during disasters such as the Fukushima earthquake in Japan, and Hurricane Katrina has revealed their potential. They can be used to spot forest fires, and monitor pipelines and crops.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” he added. There could be more ways they can be employed that no one has thought of yet, he said.

Law enforcement agencies are expected to be early adopters. There are some 19,000 local police agencies in the United States, and only about 400 of them have aircraft of any kind. The vast majority simply can’t afford them. Small UAVs will be inexpensive and easy to use.

There are privacy worries. Citizens are concerned about government or police agency spying. At least one panel will be devoted to that topic. Sturgell said police would use them mostly to respond to crimes, rather than surveillance. As experts at a recent Brooking Institute panel pointed out, the FAA is only in charge of the safety compliance. There is no federal agency that makes rules for how police may deploy the technology. Many of these issues still need to be worked out.

Anti-jamming and spoofing are some of the technical hurdles the technology must overcome, Sturgell said. Small UAVs are vulnerable to outsiders taking over their controls. Sturgell said these are not insurmountable problems. Rockwell Collins, which has subsystems in about two dozen different unmanned aircraft models, has an anti-spoofing device the size of a quarter that solves that problem, he added. It is awaiting FAA approval.

There also have to be robust data links. If a communication connection is lost, the aircraft may crash. The law mandates that larger unmanned aircraft be integrated into the airspace by 2015. The FAA wants assurances that UAVs won’t crash into neighborhoods or other aircraft.

There has been a sea change in attitudes toward integrating UAVs into the national airspace because of the potential benefits. It was once, “No we cannot do this,” he said. “I now [hear] people saying, ‘We need to solve this problem,’ which is a much different attitude,” Sturgell said.

“I think the attitude is right, the momentum is right and I am hopeful we can get this done over the next several years,” Sturgell said.

Check the National Defense Magazine blog Aug 7-9 for daily updates from the AUVSI conference in Las Vegas.

Photo Credit: U.S. Army

Posted at 8:45 AM by Stew Magnuson | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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8/6/2012

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