Issue 40 Unmanned Systems Technology October/November 2021 ANYbotics ANYmal D l AI systems focus l Aquatic Drones Phoenix 5 l Space vehicles insight l Sky Eye Rapier X-25 l FlyingBasket FB3 l GCS focus l AUVSI Xponential 2021

80 Relying on such remote infrastructure for overseeing UAV missions might bring up additional concerns over equipment integrity though, and raise the peculiar question of whether more UAVs are needed in order to inspect the UAV infrastructure. However, modular installations of companion computers and sensors can be used to monitor the key health parameters of radio stations, identifying precisely when maintenance is needed, as with unmanned vehicles and engines now. Mission AI A distinction must be made between GCSs as hardware and as software, as programs written for monitoring and controlling unmanned systems are increasingly agnostic regarding the type of platform they can be installed on. There are a few obvious features shared by GCS software systems though, such as a top-down map view, with displays and overlays of mission data on vehicle locations, survey information and air traffic feeds. Also, it is increasingly common for GCS developers to use modern gaming engines such as Unity or Unreal for high-quality visualisations of mission environments. However, the latest GCS software products are advancing the capabilities of operators beyond this standard data visibility in several key ways. One of these comes from designing software that enables autonomous management of multiple vehicles at once across air, land and sea, which can be vital to efforts in disaster relief, defence or wildfire monitoring and mitigation, for example. Interfacing across multiple different vehicles and control devices is accomplished reasonably easily when coding in C#. A flexible programming language such as this can enable comms across a dozen different protocols, data links or operating systems. It is also widely popular for other reasons – for example, it integrates directly with Unity and other gaming engines that were written in C#, and its similarity to C++ makes it easy for many programmers to learn. Often, a software module must be installed on each vehicle for translating from its comms protocol, which is often proprietary, into one the GCS can understand. For commercial UAVs, MAVLink has become a popular networking protocol and a standard one for GCS compatibility; NATO’s STANAG 4586 is similarly important in the defence world for shared command and control of unmanned systems. The trickier task is to reduce the cognitive burden on an operator during multi-vehicle missions. Flying a single UAV autonomously over a route of waypoints is simple enough, but the more unmanned assets an operator is managing, the more likely that periodic intervention will be needed owing to onboard fault detections, potential traffic conflicts, surveys turning up points of critical interest that bear closer investigation, and more. An intricate software engine composed of many pre-written autonomous behaviours is therefore key to providing a human-machine interface that saves the operator having to spin more intellectual plates than is possible without making a mistake. Supplying this successfully means operators can merely click a button in real time or pre- plan conditional autonomous responses based on mission contexts. These responses could include having one controlled vehicle follow another, or alternatively follow an uncontrolled target vehicle or the GCS (if mounted in a ship or car for example) at a specified distance, perimeter or attitude. More advanced behaviours could include rapidly building and starting a survey flight pattern for a nearby field or building, or engaging in any number of diversionary, offensive or defensive manoeuvres to help accomplish some high-level mission objective. Also, multiple vehicles could work together. For example, a UAV could land on a UGV or USV to recharge October/November 2021 | Unmanned Systems Technology New GCS software is enabling control and monitoring of large numbers of unmanned systems from multiple different devices simultaneously (Courtesy of Autonodyne)