Long-Duration, Eye-in-the-Sky Monitoring for Airfield Threat Detection

Remote airfields are vulnerable to attack from small enemy forces carrying portable weapons. Persistent surveillance from UAVs has the potential to address this need, but, limitations of existing systems must be overcome: systems require highly trained teams to support operations; The latency between initial image acquisition and response can measure in the tens of minutes; Existing systems cannot rapidly disseminate intelligence information directly to troops; persistent surveillance requires platform endurances of greater than 10 hours. Existing platforms with this level of endurance cost in the 10’s of millions of dollars and are not affordable Our approach provides a low cost system that can be autonomously launched and recovered. Operator involvement is limited to initial planning and determining responses to threats and exception events. Intelligence information is shared in real time with troops via wearable devices. The overall goal of this SBIR is to develop a low cost system for automated persistent surveillance of remote airfields. The specific objectives for phase I are to establish the airfield surveillance requirements, complete system trades and analyses to arrive at a system level design, Demonstrate critical elements of the system as a proof of concept, and prepare a detailed implementation plan for Phase II.