'Irresponsible politics’ blamed for potential hiccup in Finnish aircraft purchase

On the same subject

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  November 17, 2020 | International, Land

  QinetiQ Delivers Armed Scout Robot To Army: RCV-L

  The Robotic Combat Vehicle (Light), which can shoot missiles, launch mini-drones, and spot targets for artillery, combines a Marine Corps-tested unmanned vehicle with Army weapons and autonomy software. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: Robot-builder QinetiQ formally delivered the first of four experimental Robotic Combat Vehicles (Light) to the Army on Nov. 5, the company has announced. They will be used alongside four Textron-built RCV-Mediums in field tests. After their delivery, the Army plans to buy 16 more of each variant as it scales up to more complex experiments. Those 2022 exercises will determine the feasibility of the service's ambitious plans for a “forward line of robots” to precede human troops into battle. The RCV-Light is a “very collaborative effort” that pulls together technologies from QinetiQ, industry partner Pratt Miller, and the Army's Ground Vehicle Systems Center, QinetiQ's director of unmanned systems tells me in an email. It also builds on “years of testing” of earlier versions by the famed Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va., Jonathan Hastie says. The platform itself is Pratt Miller's EMAV (Expeditionary Autonomous Modular Vehicle), a low-slung hybrid-electric vehicle with tracks to cover rough terrain, with a maximum speed of 45 mph. It's robust enough to carry 7,200 pounds of payload – more than its own 6,800 lbs — yet compact enough to fit aboard a Marine V-22 tiltrotor or an Army CH-47 helicopter. This is the system tested by the Marines. QinetiQ provided much of the electronics and software: “the core robotic control and computing system, network and communications systems, perception and vision systems; and the safety control,” Hastie told me. Less tangible but even more critical is QinetiQ's implementation of a Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA), compliant with the Pentagon-defined Inter-Operability Profile (IOP) for ground robotics. This is the set of technical standards and common interfaces that let RCV plug-and-play a wide range of different equipment packages for specific missions. This specific vehicle features a Kongsberg CROWS-J weapon station – basically, a remote-controlled mini-turret combining a machine gun and a Javelin anti-tank missile launcher. Normally CROWS is installed on a manned vehicle, allowing the crew to operate their weapons and sensors without exposing themselves in an open hatch, but RCV includes a long-range control link to let humans operate it from different vehicle altogether. The robot can't open fire without a human pulling the trigger. (It also can't reload the Javelin without human help, so it effectively has one missile per mission, although there's plenty of machine gun ammo aboard). The RCV-L also carries a mini-drone, the HoverFly Tethered Unmanned Aerial System, which it can launch to look over buildings, hills, and obstacles while the ground vehicle stays hidden. The drone is physically connected to the robot by a power and communications cable, even during flight – hence the term “tethered.” That does limit its range but effectively allows it unlimited flight time. The Army's Ground Vehicle Systems Center provides the software to control both the drone and the weapons station. GVSC also developed the autonomy package. It's a version of the common software the Army is developing for a variety of robotic vehicles, allowing them to navigate cross-country and around obstacles without constant human intervention. The less help the machines need from humans, the more useful they can be in battle. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/11/qinetiq-delivers-armed-scout-robot-to-army-rcv-l/

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  May 19, 2021 | International, Aerospace

  Dassault Aviation et Babcock France remportent l’appel d’offre du projet Mentor - Aerobuzz

  Actualité et information aéronautique

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  August 9, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land

  Hypersonics by the dozens: US industry faces manufacturing challenge

  By: Jen Judson HUNTSVILLE, Ala. —The U.S. military is a few years from launching offensive hypersonic weapons that are currently under development. But building those initial missiles is one thing — manufacturing the weapons in multitude is another issue entirely. “I would say we really need to understand, again, how can we produce precision hardware at scale,” Michael Griffin, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told a group of reporters Aug. 7 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “If we talk about ballistic missile defense or hypersonic offense and we talk about proliferating architectures, we need any dozens, many hundreds, maybe thousands of assets,” he added. “This takes us back to the Cold War where at one point we had 30,000 nuclear warheads and missiles to launch them. We haven't produced at that kind of scale since the wall came down.” As hypersonic missiles become a reality, industry is going to have to relearn how to effectively, efficiently and economically produce them, Griffin said. While industry has developed warheads, glide bodies and other components, there is no industrial base equipped to manufacture hypersonic weapons. Things are moving in the right direction when it comes to bringing industry up to speed and preparing for larger-scale manufacturing of missiles, Griffin said. But building these systems is challenging because, for example, hypersonics require a greater degree of thermal protection than what has been required of other weapons in the past, he noted. Building hypersonics is no longer a technical issue or a matter of understanding physics, but rather an issue of understanding the industrial engineering required to produce a larger number. “I'm not sure how much help the government can be there,” he said. “Mass production is not what we do. ... That is going to be an industry problem.” The Army is just weeks away from awarding a contract to a company that will work with the federally funded laboratory that developed a hypersonic glide body to develop manufacturing plans and strategies. Other companies will have a turn as well. The effort is spearheaded by the service's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office. Griffin stressed that the weapons manufacturing process needs to be affordable. “Our adversaries have clearly found ways to make them affordable. China has these things now by the thousands. What do we do to learn, once again, how to produce sophisticated things at scale and affordably?” he said. China is able to field new systems every few years, Griffin noted, while the U.S. takes a decade or more to get through a cumbersome acquisition process. “It don't believe that the issues facing the United States aerospace and defense establishment are issues of specific technologies,” he said. “I believe that over the last 30 years ... we've become lost in our processes.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/smd/2019/08/08/hypersonics-by-the-dozens-us-industry-faces-manufacturing-challenge/