USAF Wants More Processing From Onboard Sensors

18 Aug 2011 By MARCUS WEISGERBER DefenseNews

The defense industry needs to develop smaller sensors for the U.S. military that can perform more on-board processing, in turn freeing up critical bandwidth, according to a U.S. Air Force acquisition official.

"We have to do a little bit more processing on board the sensors and not burden all the data links," Randy Walden, a director for information dominance programs in the Air Force's acquisition directorate, said during an Aug. 18 presentation at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference in Washington.

Walden, who oversees the acquisition of all Air Force unmanned aircraft, also urged industry to develop smaller sensors.

"Instead of taking something, let's say it's in the development stage, and turning it directly into some huge, heavy … power-requiring pod, we try to get that to a size, weight and power that makes sense," he said.

The Air Force has ramped up its unmanned aircraft inventory considerably over the last decade. The service currently flies 57 combat air patrols, primarily over Afghanistan and Iraq. Drones such as the MQ-1 Predator, MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-4 Global Hawk make up these patrols.

The aircraft are in high demand by troops on the ground because they provide full-motion video of the terrain below. However, as more of these satellite-driven aircraft are pushed into operations and video resolutions increase, so does the demand for bandwidth.

"If we can figure out how we turn that data ... into an image prior to shipping it over and reduce the rest of the [communications] burden and certainly some of the exploitation burden in creating that into an image, that's useful," Walden said.