Poland boosts drone purchases, to start unmanned aircraft inspectorate in January

Sur le même sujet

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  8 septembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Drones on Military Bases: Easy Aerial Competes to Create the Air Force “Base of the Future”

  Automated drone solutions have significant value in applications from surveillance to inspections of aircraft, buildings, and infrastructure. Drones on military bases have the same value – and drone startup Easy Aerial is competing to bring their tethered drone technology to the Air Force Base of the Future. AFWERX, the catalyst for fostering innovation within the U.S. Air Force, announced Easy Aerial as one of the top 92 participating teams selected from across the globe competing to build the Base of the Future Challenge. “The AFWERX Challenge is centered around six topics – Base Security, Installation Resilience, Leveraging Technology for Operational Effectiveness, Reverse Engineering, Culture of Innovation, and Airman and Family Wellbeing,” says an Easy Aerial press release. Easy Aerial is competing in the Leveraging Technology for Operational Effectiveness Challenge – a challenge to leverage artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing and machine learning to build an Air Force base “that becomes a leader in innovation.” The Base of the Future theme was inspired by Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, which was destroyed in 2018 by Hurricane Michael. Congress has approved a $ 3 billion military construction rebuild program: the Base of the Future Challenge is based on the hope that Tyndall will be rebuilt as a model of innovation for military services around the world. Easy Aerial provides drone-based monitoring and inspection solutions designed and built in the U.S. Easy Aerial solutions “are fully autonomous, all-weather capable, portable, rugged, and specifically designed for military applications,” says the announcement. Among Easy Aerial's applications is an autonomous solution for rapid maintenance inspection of large aircraft. “The system features a tethered drone attached to a self-directing base station that moves around an aircraft capturing and securely storing high-resolution images and video from multiple angles. The system dramatically reduces the time needed for current routine and emergency maintenance inspections in large hangars with scaffolding erected around the aircraft.” “We are honored to be the only participant selected to compete in three of the six Air Force base of the future challenges,” said Ido Gur, Co-Founder, and CEO of Easy Aerial. “As we move into the next phase of the challenge, we look forward to further demonstrating the capabilities and advantages of our autonomous rapid maintenance inspection system of large aircraft.” “The AFWERX Base of the Future Challenge is critical to our mission of increasing collaboration between large businesses and entrepreneurs to accelerate solutions for the Air Force,” stated Mark Rowland of AFWERX. “On behalf of AFWERX and the Department of Defense, we congratulate the teams advancing to the next phase. Their contributions are invaluable and have the potential to create game-changing results across the Air Force enterprise.” Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies. For drone industry consulting or writing, Email Miriam. https://dronescrunch.com/drones-on-military-bases-easy-aerial-competes-to-create-the-air-force-base-of-the-future/

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  20 janvier 2022 | International, Terrestre

  Industrie de l'armement : la taxonomie, un enjeu pour l’investissement

  La Tribune rappelle les enjeux liés à la taxonomie en matière de financement des industries de défense. Le quotidien évoque une note de la Banque de France sur la finance durable, datée d'octobre dernier, qui estimait que « les stratégies d'investissements responsables peuvent revêtir plusieurs formes », dont « des stratégies d'exclusion », et que « certaines entreprises sont exclues en raison de la nature de leur activité (par exemple : tabac, alcool, armement, jeux d'argent) ». Une telle classification avait suscité la réaction de la ministre des Armées, Florence Parly : « J'ai constaté, non sans une grande surprise, qu'un projet qui sera soumis à l'Union européenne place les industries de défense sur le même plan que les entreprises des secteurs pornographique ou des jeux d'argent », avait-elle indiqué, soulignant :« nous ne pouvons pas laisser faire cela sans réagir. La taxonomie influe sur le traitement réservé à un secteur d'activité selon sa classification ». La Tribune rappelle que Guillaume Faury, président du GIFAS et CEO d'Airbus, a estimé, lors de ses vœux à la presse début janvier, que le financement des activités de défense est « un vrai sujet de préoccupation » : « Il existe un certain nombre de réticences, parfois des grandes, des organismes financiers, pour des raisons qui sont plus ou moins systémiques ». Dans ce contexte, « on attend très clairement un message positif », a-t-il expliqué. Soulignant le rôle positif et sociétal de la défense, le dirigeant a déclaré souhaiter, de la part des pouvoirs publics, « une influence sur les critères de sélection des bons investissements. Un investissement qui va dans la défense permet d'assurer la sécurité, la prospérité, l'équilibre et la stabilité » d'un pays en général, et de la France en particulier. Plus particulièrement, Guillaume Faury attend « un message positif et une direction claire des autorités en général sur tout ce qui est ESG (Environnement, Social, Gouvernance) et taxonomie », a-t-il insisté. Le président du comité défense du Conseil des Industries de Défense Françaises (CIDEF), Eric Béranger, par ailleurs PDG de MBDA, avait averti également, en juin 2021, lors du Paris Air Forum organisé par La Tribune : « ce qui va sortir du projet de taxonomie de la Commission européenne va être extrêmement important : si les activités de défense sont qualifiées de non durables et, donc, d'une certaine façon non propice à des investissements financiers, ce sera une prescription très importante à destination de tous les investisseurs ». La Tribune du 17 janvier

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  18 novembre 2019 | International, C4ISR

  How Lockheed Martin Is Trying To Link Everything on the Battlefield

  BY PATRICK TUCKER Experiment by experiment, the company is weaving aircraft, ground vehicles, satellites, and the rest into a network that will someday give commanders unprecedented decision-support options. The Pentagon's efforts to digitally connect everything on the battlefield is has a big challenge to overcome: getting disparate vehicles and weapons to share data. “The interoperability of various, different systems, that's really where we are struggling. We don't have that machine to machine connection to begin with,” Air Force Brig. Gen. David Kumashiro recently told the audience at last week's Defense One Outlook 2020 conference. Over the past several years, Lockheed Martin officials say they've been working to build those connections, piece by piece and plane by plane. They started by asking, “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” and then working backwards, J.D. Hammond, vice president of C4ISR systems, told reporters at one of the company's offices. The company began by asking “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” They started with an idea of the state they wanted to reach and then worked backward. In 2013, the company launched a project, dubbed Missouri, to link the stealthy F-22 and F-35 combat jets. The Air Force has announced that they are to test a similar link next month, but the Air Force is establishing more complete linkages, including new forms of secure radio linkagages using software defined radio, and also including other assets such as Valkyrie drones. In 2015, they launched Project Iguana, extending the datalinks to the high-flying U-2 spy plane, fourth-generation combat aircraft such as the F-16, and satellites. In February 2018, they conducted an experiment under DARPA's SoSITE program that added other aircraft and a ground station. In April, their RIOT experiment connectngi jets to ground vehicles. Experiment by experiment, Lockheed tried to “systematically work” to build the components of a larger network of networks, said Hammond. There are four experiments projects planned for next year: Mayhem, focusing on links for satellites; Edison, datalinks for the Navy; Brennan, aircraft and Army units; and Project CASTL, satellites and a “space tactical layer”. Ultimately, Lockheed wants all this to add up to a “virtualized cloud-based architecture.” Think of it like the branches of a tree. A handful of ships and planes might form one network. That will, in turn, connect to a larger network that would, in turn, would be connected to the larger JEDI cloud. “You end up with virtual private clouds on the edge with a computing architecture you could have on an aircraft, on a ship, or any of the deployed nodes,” said John Clark, Lockheed's vice president of intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance and unmanned aerial systems. Most of the linked aircraft and ships in these experiments carry an Enterprise Mission Computer 2.0 — dubbed “Einstein box” after its abbreviation, EMC2 — that translates each platform's data into a shared protocol that can go out to the larger wireless network. Lockheed officials hope that bringing all these pieces together will enable a new sort of operating system for warfare. They showed journalists a new experimental battle management display to illustrate the concept. The system presents the operator with a list of effects, from devastating explosions to a quiet disabling of some enemy system; a list of available assets, including planes or drones; a map of targets; and recommendations for the best way to deliver effects to targets. As circumstances change — fuel gets low, ammunition is depleted, targets are destroyed, new enemy forces arrive, etc. — the system can send out alerts that a new plan is needed — or automatically update the plan with new instructions for pilots and drone operators. It all depends on how high the operator wants to set the autonomy. That vision is very different from the way mission tasking works today. Preston Dunlap, the chief architect of the Air Force, said at the Defense One Outlook 2020 conference, “Right now, our commanders are very limited in who they can assign to do certain” things. “More often than not, you have to assign someone because they happen to be in front of a specific place in front of a specific computer,” he said. Of course, realtime data sharing across platforms isn't a simple or clear-cut affair, even after successful experimentation. The years-long problems with Lockheed's Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, for the F-35 show how hard it can be simply to share data between operators and just one platform. The challenges of sharing data between multiple platforms, in the middle of battle in a highly contested airspace, are far larger. But commanders say they must try. “In terms of where our adversaries are,” Kumashiro said, U.S. forces have “a need to have this joint all-domain command-and-control system.” https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/11/how-lockheed-martin-trying-link-everything-battlefield/161355