Long Endurance Hovering Surveillance Platform / Urban Beat Cop

ABSTRACT: Collecting information in an urban environment is done in non-combat operations on a daily basis by local law enforcement by officers walking the beat. Officers are present on our streets. Officers become familiar with areas of the city by constantly understanding and interpreting what they see on a daily basis. A system that can perform this same mission in evolving urban conflicts, while directly removing them from missions that can be accomplished without unnecessary human participation, will significantly reduce the amount of casualties incurred. This system will remove soldiers from harms way but will allow them to continue to gather valuable intelligence. With this in mind, we propose a Small Unmanned Aerial System based on the Skate SUAS platform by Aurora Flight Sciences. Skate will begin the mission from a base station that is stationed in a known location. Skate will takeoff autonomously from the base station and fly a pre-planned mission through an urban environment, collecting surveillance data. Skates design will allow the airframe to autonomously hook a wire and hang inverted using its gimbaled camera to provide real time video. This beat cop mission will provide valuable ISR information and remove soldiers from harms way. BENEFIT: The main benefit of the proposed research is to provide a near-term technologically feasible approach to the Urban Beat Cop mission as identified as a need by AFRL and OSD. Through the effective maturation and development of these key identified features and technologies the Skate System will be able to satisfy a new type of mission that many War fighters are encountering throughout the world in the various campaigns the united states is currently engaged in. In addition to marketing the UBC Skate System to the US military this type of system with its extreme amount of autonomy and repetitive nature would be valuable to many domestic law enforcement teams that have the need for routine and repetitive surveillance where an autonomous asset may be capable of performing this mission better than personnel. In addition to the law enforcement community there are places in the border security and general security markets. Aurora has received interest from the department of homeland security for this type of asset and would be very interested when the system is able to be demonstrated. The United States also has the challenge of secures its infrastructure of railways and shipping lanes and the UBC Skate may be an ideal platform for patrolling those type of maintenance facilities in an inexpensive way. The UBC enabled Skate platform is also an ideal way for the US to provide embassy security and surveillance in foreign and hostile countries. Aurora employs a full time business development staff and will utilize them to socialize these features within our current product base and customer base to fully explore the corners of the market as far as commercialization potential is concerned with the Skate UBC platform.