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Lightweight structures. Military aspirations for extended range and endurance face the technical challenge of reducing gross weight. Advancing technology in materials as well as increasing the affordability of composite structures is being addressed in Service laboratories. In addition to the airframe, weight issues at the component level such as heat exchangers, sensors and antennas are research priorities. Weight can also be reduced by using aircraft structure and skin components to perform multiple functions such as fault detection and as an adjunct to RF capabilities. In the future, manufacturers will have new tools to integrate in their design processes to achieve the best possible performance. Some of the tools that show promise for lightweight structures are thermoset and thermoplastic resin matrix materials in advanced composites as well as fiber reinforced plastics structures.
Aircraft Onboard Intelligence
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Onboard intelligence. The more intelligence ‘packed” into the UA, the more complicated the task it can be assigned, and the less oversight required by human operators. The industry must continue efforts to increase intelligence of these aircraft, which means the Services must not only look at their intelligent systems investment portfolios, but also assess the best way to package the improvements.
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Teaming/swarming. Getting groups of UA to team (and small UA to swarm) in order to accomplish an objective will require significant investments in control technologies (distributed control technologies for swarming). Technology thrusts are to not require huge computational overhead or large communications bandwidth. Technology areas, such as bio-inspired control, offer paths to do such distributed control, but are now just coming out of the 6.1 world into 6.2. More work needs to be completed toward maturing these technologies via demos in the near term to show utility to the warfighter. This would take the aircraft from an ACL of 2 to 6.
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Health Management (ACL 2). Small UA are looked at as expendable; however, must still be able to fulfill a mission. Health management technologies need to be integrated to ensure that they are ready to go for the next mission, as well as to let the operator know that they will not be able to complete the current mission so that other assets can be tasked. These technologies are available; but just need to be modified to operate in the small UA system environment.
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Collision Avoidance. Collision avoidance will be required for any UA that plans to regularly use a nation’s controlled airspace. Collision avoidance technology is currently in development for large UA (such as AFRL’s Auto-aircraft Collision Avoidance System (ACAS)). However, these technologies or their current alternatives in the civil market (TCAS) are not well suited for direct application to small UA. Research is required into concepts of operation, sensors, and algorithms to
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