Defence Business: Australia has some very Smart Skies | ADM Nov 2010

The idea for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) competition in Australia was conceived in a Sydney taxi in 2005.

Five years on, the UAV Challenge – Outback Rescue is at the heart of a world-leading Australian movement in innovation, industry cooperation, education, skilling and regulatory development for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).

Jane Symonds | Kingaroy

The UAV Challenge, held for the fourth time this year in Kingaroy during September, comprises four competitions: the Airborne Delivery and Robot Airborne Delivery Challenges, open to Australian high school students, and the Search and Rescue Challenge, open to Australian and international university students and other entrants, as well as a Documentary Challenge.

The key foundation partners for the event are the Queensland Government, the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA) – a collaboration between the CSIRO ICT Centre, Autonomous Systems Lab, and the School of Engineering Systems at the Queensland University of Technology – and Aviation Development Australia Limited (ADAL), a not-for-profit subsidiary of Aerospace Maritime and Defence Foundation of Australia Limited which stages the biennial Avalon Airshow.

The challenges centre on ‘Outback Joe’, a life-size dummy representing a lost bushwalker in need of assistance.

The open Search and Rescue Challenge requires entrants to develop a UAV capable of leaving the airfield to search within a two-kilometre by three-kilometre search area, returning to provide judges with GPS coordinates of Joe’s location, and then delivering a water bottle as close as possible to him.

Forty-five entries were received from countries around the world for the open competition.

Of those, just 12 passed the two documentation milestones required for invitation to compete at the Challenge.

The two project deliverables included meeting a range of safety criteria, such as detailing for the judges the way in which the system would respond to navigation or communications failures.

Five teams then dropped out before the first day of competition in September, and seven teams flew during the event in Kingaroy.

After four Challenges, no team has succeeded in completing all Search and Rescue tasks in order to take home the $50,000 prize.

However, Dr Jonathon Roberts, the acting director of ARCAA and one of the ‘co-inventors’ of the Challenge, told ADM that “huge progress” had been made.

“This year the University of North Dakota team did extremely well – they found outback Joe within eight minutes,” Dr Roberts said.

“They went to do their actual drop and they noticed that the water bottle had already gone, and it had been accidentally dropped just a little bit [early].

“That’s remarkable that they could find Outback Joe within eight minutes.

“It was just one of those things – they were very, very close to winning the $50,000.”

As in previous years, the 2010 prize money was divided amongst top-performing entrants in the absence of an overall success.

The North Dakota team were awarded $15,000 for their efforts, while a second US team received $5,000 for successfully leaving the airfield and entering the search area.

In the Airborne Delivery Challenge, the remotely piloted UAV is flown over a target area, and a mission manager relies solely on vision provided by the aircraft to time payload delivery in order to drop an assistance package – in this year’s competition, a chocolate bar – as close as possible to Joe.

Teams are judged on the time taken to complete the challenge, and the proximity of their drop to the target.

A team from Calamvale Community College in Queensland took out the $5,000 for dropping their payload between Joe’s legs, beating out seven other teams, including two from Queensland’s Mueller College, one from South Australia’s Riverton and District High School, and four teams from Brisbane’s Aviation High.

The Robot Airborne Delivery Challenge awards points for the level of autonomy demonstrated by the UAVs, with maximum points received for packages dropped autonomously.

No teams qualified for the Robot Airborne Delivery Challenge in 2010.

A two-person team from Melbourne won $5,000 in the Documentary Challenge, for the best film recording the team’s preparations for the Challenge.

The competitive spirit

With Team Australia recently successful at the World Finals of the F1 in Schools engineering competition, and the winners of the first Multi-Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC) to be announced during the 2010 Land Warfare Conference, ADM asked what it was that was so effective about these competitions in encouraging the industry’s next generation.

Dr Roberts said the creation of incentives, and the delivery of a challenge – which may not necessarily result in winners and losers, but still contribute to progress – were key elements.

“There’s been a big history of [competition]: the crossing of the Atlantic in a regular plane was a competition back in the 1920s,” Dr Roberts said.

“And the first private people into space a few years ago…that was a competition as well, so there’s a huge history of engineering competition, over the last 100 years at least.

“There’s currently a competition to land a robot on the moon.”

Insitu Inc.’s Ryan Hartman expressed a similar view.

“Innovation to us means a lot of different things, but I can tell you that innovation comes from the presentation of a challenge – and it’s clear that the Outback Challenge has presented a problem or a challenge to these teams.

“They’re really stepping up and they’re innovating every day.”

The Defence connection

One of the main goals of the UAV Challenge is to promote civilian UAV applications and development.

But a quick glance at the list of supporting organisations – Boeing Defence Australia (BDA) and Boeing Research and Technology-Australia, Insitu Pacific, CAE, even the Royal Australian Navy – points to the fact that it also has defence significance, particularly in the areas of skilling, development of training and education, and airspace management.

“There’s a couple of [defence-related] areas that come to mind straight away, one clearly is growing an organic skills and experience base here in Australia,” Insitu Pacific’s Dale McDowall told ADM.

“This is a great opportunity for the kids to come out from the schools and compete in something that otherwise they really wouldn’t get the opportunity to do.

“It’s excellent as an incentive to excite the kids about this technology and getting involved in that in the future.”

Boeing Research and Development-Australia’s Brendan Williams, who was on the technical committee and the Search and Rescue judging panel for the event, said that as well as bringing budding aviators and engineers into contact with the industry, the competition provided invaluable ‘hands-on’ experience which would serve them well in future aerospace careers.

“We’re working on a system that has a lot of complexities, and the more parts of that system you understand, I think the better the design solution,” Williams said.

“And so for these students working on operations, design, maintenance and understanding the regulatory environment, it’s all good experience that they may not have got until much later in their career.

“What we’re actually doing here [in the Challenge] is a mini version of what would happen on a Defence contract.

“An RFT is the equivalent of the rules and regulations, they’ve got to go out and build it and we have milestone checkpoints they’ve got to pass through.

“They’ve got to have the safety case, they’ve got to convince us that it’s safe to fly, that it’s fit for purpose and all those things.

“What we’ve found over the years is some of the things that we find in the military or commercial environment, we don’t enforce on [the competitors], but they learn those lessons and do it themselves anyway.

“So last year we had teams that kept full maintenance log books on their aircraft, which is equivalent to what we would do on an aircraft in the real world.

“We didn’t mandate it; they learned that the best way to understand configuration, what work had been done, what hadn’t been done and things like that, was to keep a maintenance log book.

“And what it means is when they transition to industry, they understand why that system is in place because they’ve learnt it in a safe environment rather than just being told, ‘this is what you’re going to do’,” Williams said.

Problem shared, problem halved?

The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) is in the process of revising the current regulation that governs the use of UAS.

Australia is currently the only country in the world with UAS regulations – they were produced in 2002 – but they are operational rather than certification regulations.

In partnership, industry and CASA are also developing a range of competencies that will fit into the national training framework to provide qualifications and potentially licensing for UAS operations, as well as working towards development of UAV airworthiness certifications.

The UAV Challenge has been a key component of the collaboration between the regulator and industry.

“Over the last two years we’ve been able to demonstrate that we can safely operate UAVs and manned aircraft in a joint environment, and that is [significant] both commercially and in the military,” Williams told ADM.

“At the moment the military only fly UAVs either in an area of operations or in military-controlled airspace.

“They have problems transiting between military airspace and they’re looking for the same solutions that the commercial operators are looking for.”

CASA’s UAS specialist, Phil Presgrave, said the regulator was also working closely with Defence as the regulation development progressed.

“We’re working together to make sure that our processes and a lot of our procedures and rules are identical,” Presgrave said.

“This is particularly evident in the training scene, and has been established already within the Aviation Training Package for pilots, and that package has been recognised in Defence as well as it is in the civilian sector, so we want to do the same thing in the UAV space.

“There’s not a lot of military airspace in Australia that’s solely for military use, so at some point in time they’ll want to fly in civilian airspace so we’ve got to work through how we’re going to accommodate that.”

Presgrave said there were lessons for CASA to learn from military UAV operational experience, particularly in relation to segregating aircraft in circuit areas, training and maintenance procedures, and accident and incident reporting.

Up, up and away

Dr Jonathon Roberts told the 2010 UAV Challenge industry dinner that he had stumbled upon the original concept documents this year, and found that over its short history the Challenge had fulfilled the organisers’ original goals, which included: enhancing CASA collaboration during the formative period of regulation development; gaining valuable flight test management experience; providing the opportunity to identify and secure academic candidates in the area; increasing exposure and strategic positioning of ARCAA between potential end-users, emerging markets and OEM technology providers; and raising awareness and publicity for UAVs in civilian applications.

Dr Roberts told ADM the organisers had every intention of seeing the competition continue – and evolve – for the foreseeable future.

“The open challenge that we’ve got is actually just an intermediate challenge,” Dr Roberts said.

“The real challenge is actually far more difficult, but we decided it was so difficult that we wouldn’t tell the world about it quite yet, and we’ll wait for people to finish this one before we then pitch the real one.

“If someone wins here, then we know what the next one will be. So it won’t be all over if someone wins.”

Smart Skies success

Jane Symonds | Kingaroy

The Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation’s (ARCAA) Smart Skies project, focusing on the development of technology to enable manned and unmanned aircraft to effectively share airspace, is approaching its final milestone.

The latest flight trials included all of the project elements, including a fixed-wing UAV and a modified Cessna flying in automatic mode, flying collision scenarios with simulated aircraft.

The final flight trial will take place in December this year, before project wrap-up and final reports in 2011, and, ultimately, the attempt to commercialise the Smart Skies intellectual property.

ARCAA acting director Dr Jonathon Roberts told ADM a new research project was also on the cards.

The collision-avoidance research is one of two key areas in which the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) requires proof that technology in unmanned aircraft can operate in a way equivalent to human pilots.

“In the future research we’re trying to hit the next problem: Smart Skies is all about collision avoidance and managing the avoidance of collisions; the next thing that CASA will require will be automatic landing systems,” Dr Roberts said.

“So that if you have an engine failure or other catastrophic failure and you have to come down, you’ve got to be able to put it down in a safe place, so these will be vision systems that actually look at the ground and figure out where to land.

“That’s the next thing that has to be done before UAVs can fly over populous areas.”