2 septembre 2020 | International, Terrestre, Autre défense
WASHINGTON: Army Futures Command is drafting a formal requirement for a military exoskeleton and will seek feedback from manufacturers at a November industry day. The Army's top priority, officials told me: rapidly prototyping a system that helps the wearer “move faster, travel further, and carry heavier loads” – without breaking down in the heat of battle.
“Reliability is a huge issue that needs to be resolved,” said Ted Maciuba, deputy director of robotic requirements for Futures Command.
Now, don't expect a full-body bulletproof suit that can fly and access huge databases out of science fiction. “We are not going after the Starship Troopers/Iron Man system right off the bat,” said Rich Cofer, a former soldier who's now the Army's lead “capabilities developer” on the exoskeleton project. “We're not going to jump right in and expect Tony Stark... Expectation management is key.”
(That's a stark contrast to Special Operations Command's highly publicized TALOS program, which explicitly compared itself to Iron Man but produced nothing of the kind).
So instead of Iron Man, think Iron Leg. In a “soldier touchpoint” last December at Fort Drum, NY, Army soldiers from more than two dozen Military Occupational Specialties — ranging from infantry to supply — tried out various types of “lower-body exoskeletons,” including the Lockheed Martin ONYX that our own Paul McLeary tries out in this video. In essence, these are motorized knee braces and other wearable reinforcements for the legs that lighten the load on overburdened soldiers as they march for hours with heavy packs, manhandle artillery shells and such. The goal isn't to give the wearer superpowers, but to reduce fatigue and risk of injury.
During the Fort Drum trials, “there were significant increases in the effectiveness of soldiers,” Maciuba told me. “The soldiers were able to do more with the exoskeleton than they could without.”
That said, “we learned [that] there needs to be enough reliability engineered into our systems so that there is a very high probability they will not fail in use,” Maciuba continued. “It's one thing to be wearing a boot whose sole flips off. You can always take some 100-mile-an-hour tape and tape that back on your foot. It's another thing to be wearing an exoskeleton” that requires specialized training and tools to fix. So reliability will be a high priority when the Army speaks to potential vendors in mid-November.
By that point, Maciuba & co. expect to have a draft Abbreviated Capabilities Development Document for industry to review and offer comment on. (Army Futures Command officially gave them the go-ahead to write the ACDD on Aug. 14th; the exoskeleton project falls under the command's Soldier Lethality team, with input from PEO-Soldier acquisition officials, Natick Soldier Systems Center researchers, and capability managers for infantry, armored, and Stryker units). While unclassified, the document will be considered sensitive and only released to qualified contractors.
While the ACDD is formally considered a requirements document, Maciuba told me, it's not going to set rigid technical specs as would a traditional Army requirement. The technology is advancing way too fast to get that detailed at this early stage. Instead, he said, it will outline “desirable characteristics” but leave industry plenty of leeway to innovate on specific ways to achieve them – and the Army is open to revising those desires based on what industry says is actually achievable.
“We want industry to grade our work,” Maciuba said. The industry day – which will be held online unless there's some miraculous breakthrough with COVID-19 – will include both a general session open to all contractors and one-on-one meetings with specific contractors so they can discuss their technology without competitors listening. Afterwards, Maciuba, Cofer, & co. will compile the feedback from all the companies, revise the ACDD, and send it to Army leaders for approval.
The final Abbreviated Capabilities Development Document should be out by the end of 2021, Cofer estimated. The next step? Use a streamlined acquisition process known as Section 804, intended to field a working prototype within five years – that is, Maciuba cautioned, if the Army can find the funding.
31 octobre 2024 | International, Aérospatial
Col. Charles "Tre" Del Pizzo said the commandant of the Marine Corps ordered his removal from command after reviewing the crash investigation.
14 janvier 2021 | International, Naval
By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy wants to buy a next-generation large surface combatant by the end of the 2030s, but its not being built for a new kind of sensor or weapon system. The newly dubbed DDG(X) is being built for power. The Navy has, of course, built ships around advancements in engineering systems before: Nuclear power or steam engines, for example, have led to big leaps in naval design. But the large surface combatant is being built around a significant challenge. Weapons systems of the future such as high-powered electronic warfare systems, laser weapons, and high-powered radars and sensors will put an uneven and sometimes even unpredictable load on a ship's power system. That's pushing the Navy toward an integrated power system, says Rear Adm. Paul Schlise. “We're going to incorporate an Integrated Power System that has the ability to power up the weapons and sensors of the future,” Schlise said during the Surface Navy Association's virtual annual symposium. “[That's] the key to the realm here. It's DDG-1000-like, in some respects in that it'll have that integrated power system, but the most important thing is including the space, weight, power and cooling — reestablishing those margins to incorporate future systems that are not yet mature. “There's a lot of promise in some of those systems, but that integrated power system is the key to incorporating those feature systems that we're looking at, that we think are going to be part of that class of ship.” What is an integrated power system? Mark Vandroff, a former senior director of the National Security Council and a retired Navy captain who was the program manager for the Navy's new DDG Flight III program, said it's a major break from the kind of system used on Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. “A major advantage of a ship with an integrated power system is that the power generated by any of the ship's engines can be used for either propulsion or electricity, rather than having engines solely dedicated to one or another.” On today's destroyer, and on the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, the ship has separate systems that power the twin propulsion shafts, which turn the ship's propeller and generators that work exclusively to power the ship. An integrated power system, similar to what is on the Zumwalt-class destroyers, uses all the ship's engines to make electricity that turns the propellers and powers the weapons and sensors. The integrated power system on Zumwalt is a new layout that uses advanced induction motors to produce up to 78 megawatts of electrical power, far more than any previous destroyer or cruiser. But the issue with the large surface combatant is a little more complicated than just producing a ton of power. What energy weapons or advanced electronics systems do is put a huge tax on the electrical system of a ship, often requiring more power than the ship is able to produce at one time. So while the integrated power system isn't new, the kinds of demands these new systems will place on the power grid meant to run everything is a new kind of challenge, said Matthew Collette, associate professor of naval architecture and marine engineering at the University of Michigan. Therefore, the Navy must figure out how to best store energy so it can be available to meet unpredictable demands. “The issue is, this is different than integrated electric propulsion, which we've had on cruise ships and offshore supply vessels for two decades at this point, and it works really well,” Collette said. “But on those ships, all the electrical loads are pretty well behaved: They rise and fall slowly, and there's no issues with the stability of the electrical system. “High-powered radars, high-powered electronic warfare, certainly rail guns, the lesser extent lasers — they all ask for power really quickly, faster than a mechanical generator can suddenly produce it. So now you have to think about whether [you] use batteries or flywheels or capacitors or other techniques to get the energy available on the timescale that the load needs.” It's not an insurmountable problem, and it is one the Navy has used elsewhere. The electromagnetic launch system on the Ford-class, which has had its share of technical problems, operates off a flywheel energy storage system. But the new power system already has Congress nervous, and lawmakers are pressuring the Navy to build a land-based engineering site to test out the power and propulsion system before getting too deep into the design work for the ship. Collette said that's a sensible approach, and that on the timeline the Navy is discussing, the technology should be sufficiently advanced to support the new class. “There's been a ton of work done on this, and I think it's certainly something that in the timeframe of a large surface combatant, I would expect would work,” he said. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/surface-navy-association/2021/01/13/for-the-us-navy-the-future-of-shipbuilding-and-warfare-is-in-the-power-plant
9 juillet 2022 | International, Aérospatial
DÉFENSE L'Allemagne et la Suède se joignent à la future initiative européenne pour le développement d'un avion de transport européen de nouvelle génération L'Allemagne et la Suède ont rejoint la France pour étudier le développement futur d'un avion de transport européen de nouvelle génération qui pourrait remplacer des types tels que le Lockheed C-130 Hercules et le CASA CN235. Selon un communiqué de presse de l'armée de l'Air et de l'Espace, les 3 pays ont signé un accord pour travailler sur la définition d'un futur cargo tactique de taille moyenne (FMTC), qui pourrait conduire au développement d'un nouvel avion de transport européen d'ici 2040. Le document a été signé lors d'un événement à Orléans, où l'armée de l'Air et de l'Espace et l'Agence Européenne de Défense ont organisé un séminaire sur le déploiement de la boussole stratégique de l'Union européenne dans le domaine aérien. Le FMTC est l'une des nombreuses initiatives de transport aérien étudiées dans le cadre de l'initiative de coopération structurée permanente (PESCO) de l'Union européenne visant à encourager une plus grande coopération en matière de marchés publics de Défense entre les États membres. Outre les 3 nations partenaires, d'autres pays pourraient encore se joindre au projet, selon les responsables. Un tel avion pourrait incorporer de nombreux éléments de l'A400M, tels que les moteurs, afin de réduire les coûts de développement de la plateforme et de bénéficier d'une approche familiale de la conception. La capacité de la future plateforme serait de 18 à 20 tonnes de fret, contre environ 35 tonnes pour l'A400M. Les futures études de faisabilité industrielle pourraient permettre de lancer le développement d'un tel avion en 2026-2027. Aviation Week du 7 juillet