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17 that can be operated by a relatively small number of people. “Effectively you are starting to abstract some of the more complicated controlling mechanics from the mission characteristics, trying to move more towards role-based planning for the systems, which then facilitates collaborative behaviour,” he says. Integrating any complex system requires a number of technical building blocks. “We start with an architecture, and that needs to involve elements of safety and security, as well as human factors,” Skinner explains. “The key to getting all those elements together in a short time – of the order of 12 to 18 months – is standardised connectivity, yet different sensory elements use different standards.” Open, common standards and a common way of tasking them are essential to ensuring that different unmanned vehicles interoperate successfully. He says, “The goals for these systems flow down to a way in which they can be controlled, and then a common way to deal with the product that comes out of them – either video or radar tracks – and a way to present this information in a common form so that naval end- users can see a fused picture rather than having to look at individual stations for individual platforms.” ACER, the heart of the integration effort, emerged from the MoD’s Maritime Autonomous Platform Exploitation programme, which is a long-term effort with several years still to run. ACER, however, had evolved to a point at which it could provide a glimpse of the future in an early technical demonstration using existing comms protocols. The system that Thales integrated directly into the ACER was a British Army standard Watchkeeper WK450 fitted with in-house and third-party sensors, namely an Elbit Compass high- definition multi-sensor electro-optical turret producing full-motion video (FMV) feeds, and Thales’ own I-Master radar, which has synthetic aperture radar, ground moving target indication and a new maritime moving target indication mode that was put through its paces during Unmanned Warrior. The protocols adopted were commercial video standards including H.264 and the real-time streaming protocol along with others to communicate radar tracks, including those from Watchkeeper. For these, Thales worked with a standard known as the Open Architecture Radar Interface Specification (OARIS). “That really facilitated feeding track data into the combat management system,” Skinner says. “Then the end- users could look at their normal track picture, which is derived from their own organic sensors like the radar, automatic identification system [AIS] data and various other things, and they could see the tracks from the UXVs integrated into them and select those tracks to see any video data associated with them.” Integrating Watchkeeper with the ACER was simplified by the fact that it already supports the commercial video standards, but there was work to do on the radar feed. “That was relatively easy in terms of FMV, but for the open architecture radar interface we wrote a small piece of code that effectively took the data generated by Watchkeeper’s I-Master and turned that into maritime tracks in OARIS format.” Wider integration These were elements of a larger integration effort that took place in several stages and in different places, he explains. Initial software development took place at Thales’ Manor Royal site in Crawley, Sussex, while much of the integration with the ACER was done at a facility in Portsdown Technology Park outside Portsmouth on the UK’s south coast, where the Royal Navy’s Centre for Maritime Intelligence Systems – effectively the service’s hub for autonomous systems activities – is also located. The main integration elements carried out at Portsmouth, Skinner says, included connecting the Watchkeeper receiver to the ACER container, internally setting up the equipment to be used for the trial and some initial virtual testing as a means of reducing technical risks. Chris Skinner | In conversation Unmanned Systems Technology | February/March 2017 A Thales Halcyon USV and other vessels gather at the British Underwater Technical Evaluation Centre in preparation for mine- hunting operations during Unmanned Warrior (Courtesy of Thales)