Unlike current Navy configured Fire Scouts, P7 was built in an operational land-based configuration. It is the first MQ-8B to fly without flight test instrumentation normally installed for developmental flights, a clear indication of MQ-8B's system maturity. P7 continues Northrop Grumman's commitment to customers around the globe by building upon the rigorous developmental testing being supported by P6, the first company owned Fire Scout. 

The completion of first flight paves the way for continued operations to validate the functionality of all system elements leading to the execution of operationally relevant mission scenarios that demonstrate Fire Scout's unprecedented capability in support of the warfighter. 

"Being a Vertical Unmanned Aerial System, Fire Scout brings many tactical advantages to the fight," said Mike Howell, Business Development Manager for Army systems at Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector. "It goes where the warfighter goes, is not tied to airfields or recovery sites, and provides enhanced, direct support for the ground commander." 

After successfully completing fully autonomous flight operations onboard the USS McInerney (FFG-8) frigate in May, Fire Scout is well poised to demonstrate capabilities in reconnaissance surveillance and target acquisition/ intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (RSTA/ISR), communications relay, logistics resupply, and other key missions uniquely suited to vertical UAS. 

"Fire Scout's ability to perch and stare allows it to readily acquire and track targets in the urban and complex terrains America's warfighters are engaged," Howell said. "Its capacity at the tactical level allows it to carry larger more capable payloads, including communications relay, than other tactical UAS, giving the commander more options and greater flexibility when planning and executing operations." 

The P7's capability demonstrations will continue throughout the summer, with missions in support of land-based operations as a priority. In conjunction with continued flight operations of P6, P7 underscores Fire Scout's joint role as a program of record within both the Navy and the Army.

The 11-person team, seven of which were engineers while the others worked in business and promotional capacities, took the overall prize, followed by the University of Delaware in second place and Bluefield State College in third.  

"The key we have identified ... is to try to have continuity from one year to the next," says Detroit Mercy electrical engineering professor Mark Paulik. Of the 11 students in the two-semester capstone course, four of the students built the university's 2008 winning robot. The college also invites its juniors to observe the IGVC the year before they take the course to see what the competition is like.  

Fifty-two teams registered for the event, held 5-9 June at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., from 46 different U.S., Canadian, Japanese and French universities. Of those teams, 29 actually qualified, according to Jerry Lane of Applied Research Associates, an IGVC committee member and an AUVSI association officer. 

After qualifications, the remaining competitors were met with an extremely rainy day, causing the competition to run an hour over the allotted time. The University of Delaware placed first in this year's autonomous challenge, finishing in the same time as Detroit Mercy but with 15 more points.  

The committee decided to reconfigure the autonomous competition this year into a figure eight shape with a double-lane track. Lane says the track made it possible to perform four different runs on the course, making it hard to minimize course memorization. Three teams almost made it through all four chicanes.  

Paulik called Lane's track for this year "devious." In his senior design class, Paulik's students conceptualized, simulated and tested robots on university-owned tracks in preparation for the event.  

Students met weekly for three hours outside of class in preparation for the competition, but toward the final few weeks, Paulik estimates that his students were spending between 30 and 40 hours each per week on the challenge. He was even contacted by the dean, who was concerned when a student was found sleeping in the lab, complete with sleeping bag and pad.  

Through grants the college received to restructure its program, the University of Detroit Mercy's electrical engineering major has students working with robots for all four years, and starting in the fall it will begin a robotics master's program.  

Princeton University, last year's Rookie of the Year and third overall winner, beat out Detroit Mercy for first in the navigation challenge. The vehicles had to make their way through from a starting point to a target destination and return to home base given only latitude and longitude information.  

This year's Rookie of the Year Award went to the U.S. Naval Academy and its Robo-Goat vehicle. The team placed ninth in the navigation challenge and 18th in the autonomous challenge.  

The University of Wisconsin-Madison won the design challenge, which includes an oral presentation where students describe their vehicle in depth to an audience they should consider as senior management group that would fund the project if the presentation went well.  

In addition to Lane, other organizers and coordinators for the event include Ka Cheok of Oakland University, Bill Agnew of SAE International and Bernard Theisen from the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command.

However, the team from the University of Arizona ended up taking home the most prize money with its propeller-topped vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicle. 

ISAE SUPAERO took home $2,700, and the University of Braunschweig team took home $1,500 for its third-place overall showing at the competition, which was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, the University of West Florida and AUVSI's Emerald Coast Chapter. 

The competition was held in two stages. The first part was an outdoor segment where teams conducted various trials, including precise waypoint navigation demonstrations, target recognition, a paintball drop and precise landing, and a "search, verify and follow" mission. 

The second segment was an indoor competition where the vehicles had to perform a variety of tasks, including landing on uneven platforms, flying around two poles, surviving a gauntlet of fans and navigating through a plywood "house," which proved especially treacherous. 

ISAE SUPAERO was split into two groups, one of which flew a twin-engine monoplane aircraft for the outdoor competition and one of which flew two biaxial twin-rotor ducted-fan vehicles for the indoor part. Some of the teams flew at least one of the indoor missions via remote control. The French team relied on tele-operation for all its attempts (operators controlled the vehicle through their laptops rather than via a handheld RC device), which helped their points tally, although the ducted-fan aircraft ended up on their heads several times. 

All of the competitors did well with the "pole dance," which required them to fly the pattern both for a set time and until their power sources ran out. The uneven surfaces proved harder, as did the series of fans designed to try to blow the vehicles off course (which it sometimes did). 

The plywood house (outfitted with AUVSI's "My Other Vehicle is Unmanned" bumper sticker above its door) posed an even more difficult problem, particularly the part that called for the vehicles to fly up and out via a chimney. All the vehicles crashed in the attempt with the sound echoing loudly throughout the house, but all were still operational at the end of the competition. 

The next iteration of the competition, the European Micro Air Vehicle (EMAV) competition, is scheduled for 14 to 17 September in Delft, the Netherlands.

Student UAS Competition at Webster Field, Maryland:  http://www.stickam.com/auvsi2009suas  (This streaming video is available throughout the competition.) 

International Autonomous Surface Vehicle Competition at Virginia Beach, Virginia:  http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/surface.cfm
Note:  The ASV Finals are Sunday from 2pm - 5pm EDT and the webcast link will be provided on the ASV Competition website. Daily recaps from the first two days of the event are available on the website.

The Camcopter S-100 will be the first-ever Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) to fly as part of the official flight displays at this year's 100 year anniversary of "Salon du Le Bourget" from June 15 to 19. June. 

Schiebel, of Austria, developer and manufacturer of the Camcopter S-100, is honoured to be making history with its acclaimed VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) UAV. 

Approval for the history-making flights was granted on the basis of the S-100's existing EASA certification and a series of test flights conducted in April at the Flight Test Centre (CEV) in Istres, France. 

Schiebel's Air Services Team comprehensively demonstrated the Camcopter S-100's planned flight manuevers and emergency procedures, proving its ability to fly safely at the Paris Air Show. The CEV validated the system's performance and both the Committee of Organization of the Paris Air Show and the Civil Aviation Authority of France, DGAC (Direction Generale d'Aviation Civile), observed and assisted with the tests. Based on their expertise and responsibility in this area, the DGAC issued the final flight permission for the S-100 UAS to perform at the Paris Air Show. 

The fully autonomous CamcopterS-100 is an extremely versatile VTOL UAS, with a maximum takeoff weight of 200 kg and an endurance of over 6 hours, and designed as closely as possible to relevant manned aircraft standards. It will demonstrate its unrivalled capabilities during the daily flight displays within visual range of the audience. 

During the flights, real-time high resolution daylight and infrared video will be fed to the Paris Air Show's own TV station and displayed on large screens for the audience. The video images will be provided by the French-made Thales Agile II gimbaled EO/IR camera system, mounted in the S-100's main payload bay. 

One hundred years after a visionary group of French inventors and aircraft builders staged the first "airborne locomotion exhibition" at the Grand Palais in Paris, Schiebel's Camcopter S-100 will be adding yet another milestone to aviation's storied history. 

Daily flight displays: from Monday, June 15, to Friday, June 19 at 1:30 pm.

James McFarlane, founder of Canada's International Submarine Engineering Ltd., says there have been several major generations of unmanned underwater systems, including ROVs and the later AUVs. Hybrids may represent the next phase of system evolution. This could also include semi-submersible vehicles that can deploy ROVs and submarines that can deploy AUVs. 

"This isn't rocket science, it's just applications of existing technology," says McFarlane, who spoke at the second day of the Undersea Defence Technology conference here (AUVSI had a booth at the show). 

Transporting systems by air to locations where they are needed will also be commonplace, he says. This would allow a mine countermeasure underwater vehicle to arrive at a mined location much faster than a surface minesweeper, he says. 

As for AUV-launching submarines, launching the vehicles from torpedo tubes is easy but getting the vehicle back on board is the hard part, he says, the equivalent of "winning first prize at the country fair." To that end, two engineers from France's DCNS say they have been experimenting with torpedo deployment and ROV retrieval, tapping into the company's long experience with torpedoes. 

After being launched from a torpedo tube, a 21-inch AUV demonstrator would conduct its mission and then glide to the sea floor. Then a ROV onboard the submarine would deploy, attach itself to the AUV and stow it in a rear storage compartment. 

Dominic Bruneau and Frederick Schom say that while the system isn't perfect - it doesn't allow for the AUV to be taken back on board and reconfigured - it's probably the best option for small submarines such as the Scorpene-class vehicles they used in the demonstration. 

Brett Davis is editor of Unmanned Systems

Merton Cox, director of the CBP Air and Marine's National Air Training Center, says he was directed last year to institute a training program for the border protection agency after a landing accident banged up one of the agency's Predator unmanned aircraft. 

After the accident, Cox says he was given the job of incorporating UAS training into the agency's overall aviation training. The CBP now flies Predator vehicles in addition to its manned aircraft, and they're growing increasingly popular: "The more we use this system the more requests we get to use it," Cox says. 

The agency has training facilities in Oklahoma City and El Paso, Texas, but "what I currently don't have is a UAS dedicated to training, nor do I have instructors dedicated to training," Cox says. 

The CBP also conducts training while doing operations and operations always take precedence, which can hurt training. Cox says he'd also like to have simulators so that training accidents don't have to mean aircraft with bent propellers, or worse. 

The agency's goal is to have 65 pilots and sensor operators by 2011, an ambitious plan and one he says he needs Department of Defense, industry and academic help to achieve. 

Robbie Hood, of NOAA's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program, says her agency is also increasing its use of UAS and recently held a summit meeting in Washington to bring all its unmanned systems stakeholders and users up to speed. 

"One of the big issues was, how are we going to handle the training?" she says.  

Hood says NOAA will have a core group of UAS operators but the agency is also looking to add new sensors to its vehicles and it wants to make sure its training is up to the job. 

Cox and Hood helped kick off the third Unmanned Aircraft Systems Action Summit here, hosted by the Red River Valley Research Corridor, the University of North Dakota and the state's congressional officials. 

The theme of this year's summit is "The Future of UAS Pilot Training & Emerging UAS Technologies," and while CBP, NOAA and the military are looking for pilots for the future, the Grand Forks area is positioning itself to be able to help provide them. 

The Grand Forks Air Force Base is preparing to take on a new UAS mission with Predator and Global Hawk vehicles next year, CBP has is establishing a northern border equivalent of its southern border Predator patrols based out of the same base, and the 119th Wing North Dakota Air National Guard in nearby Fargo is flying Predators in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The UND John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences is also offering a bachelor of science degree in UAS operations. The state's Board of Education just approved the degree on May 14 and the school plans to begin courses this fall. 

Col. John Michel, commander of Grand Forces AFB, says the base has gone through many changes and missions since it was founded in the 1950s - including losing its recent Air Force tanker work and nearly getting put on the closing list in the last base-closing round - but it is embracing the new UAS mission and is going all out to expand it. 

"We're about to get as small as we've ever been," he says, joking that U-Haul is the base's official sponsor, but he says the base should return to growth in coming years with its UAS work. 

Brett Davis is editor of Unmanned Systems.

The bill provides $53.5 billion for the FAA's capital programs from Fiscal Years 2010 through 2012: 

$12.3 billion for the Airport Improvement Program;
$10.1 billion for FAA Facilities & Equipment;
$30.3 billion for FAA Operations; and
$794 million for Research, Engineering, and Development. 

For more information, please visit here.

To view the Small Unmanned Aircraft System Aviation Rulemaking Committee Comprehensive Set of Recommendations for sUAS Regulatory Development please visit:
http://www.auvsi.org/news/sUAS_ARC.pdf. 

This link will also be available soon on the FAA's website www.faa.gov/uas. Please visit this site for additional information.

Senator Dorgan is hosting the Action Summit along with the Red River Valley Research Corridor, the UND Center for UAS Research and Education and the Grand Forks Air Force Base. The May 27 session will be held at the Alerus Center. The May 28 session will be held at Grand Forks Air Force Base. 

Senator Dorgan is convening experts in unmanned aircraft systems from around the nation to discuss the future of the industry at the Action Summit. Keynote speakers will include two of the U.S. military's top experts in UAS technology - Lt. Gen. Harry "Bud" Wyatt, Director of the Air National Guard; and Maj. Gen. Henry "Hank" Morrow, Commander of the 1st Air Force and the Continental U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command Region. 

"Grand Forks and the Red River Valley are becoming a well-known hub of unmanned aircraft activity," Dorgan said. "I've invited experts from around the country to this Action Summit to give us an opportunity to host a conversation on what is happening in this industry and where it's headed in the future." 

In 2005, Senator Dorgan, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, secured federal funding to create a Center for Defense UAV Education at UND to help transform the region into a hub of unmanned aircraft activity. Dorgan also worked with Senator Conrad and Congressman Pomeroy to persuade the Air Force to bring a new UAS mission to the Red River Valley, and to secure a Northern Border Air Wing branch mission, which includes unmanned aircraft that patrol the U.S.-Canada border, for Grand Forks.

"We are there, as far as the maturity of the technology, to use unmanned systems for port security," LeBouvier said at AUVSI's Unmanned Systems Europe 2009. 

He said sensor and navigation systems manufacturers have gotten so good that vehicle makers like Bluefin can introduce systems that can scan sea floors and detect changes, monitor ship hulls for explosives or even carry out underwater architectural studies. 

"The kind of data that you're getting from these vehicles is just amazing," LeBouvier said; so good that little training is needed for system users to pick out potentially dangerous devices. 

He said while it's still impossible to scan every port, cities or countries could set up a use plan and deploy the systems wisely and widely. 

"Take advantage of these things. They're there, they're for use. The more people use them, the more they see they're ready for prime time." 

Thomas Pastore of the NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC), which hosted the conference, said unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are able to react faster than subsurface vehicles and also are easier to communicate with, but can't see as much underwater. However, adding sensors to USVs and deploying them below the surface expands that capability. 

"You start mixing it up and you get some of the best of both worlds," he said. 

NURC has experimented with its own USV, adding a side-scan sonar and an autonomous processing system developed by MIT. 

Italy's Calzoni has done something similar with its new U-Ranger USV, which was demonstrated at the show. The Ranger uses a Reson Seabat-7128 sonar which can be deployed one meter below the keel. 

The company is working on using onboard infrared imaging for automatic obstacle avoidance capability, said the company's Daniele Bertin, but that system still has trouble picking out objects hidden behind waves.

David Bradley, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, reported the results of a study of distributed remote sensing for naval undersea warfare-basically, nodes and networks of "smart" sensors that can find submarines. 

Technology has "favored the opponent" in the anti-submarine game, Bradley said, because it's easier to make the submarines stealthy than it is to develop ways to find them. 

A series of nodes connecting fixed and moving sensors could help even those odds, he said, and work is under way on several such systems. They would include the sensors, some possibly mounted on unmanned vehicles, some processing capability in each node, and a way to send data from the sensors and commands to the sensors. 

Automating the detection and classification function of such sensors is a "key enabler" for distributed remote systems (DRS), he said, and the networks aren't associated with a single type of platform. 

However, he said that current efforts to develop DRS are not well coordinated and he recommended that a single program office be set up to spearhead the work. One project that was under consideration in the study was shut down before the study was briefed to the Chief of Naval Operations, Bradley said. 

"The lack of disciplined analysis and experimentation is a major impediment to progress," he said. 

Tim Young, the business development director for the United Kingdom's Cobham Defence, said his company has developed a network based on the Coded Orthoganl Frequency Division Multiplexed (COFDM) radio, which spun out from the broadcast industry, which needed a way to send lots of data fast. 

It's "ideal for urban operations," he said, because it uses compression techniques to squeeze data down to fit in limited bandwidth. The smallest systems are the size of a credit card and can use as little as 50 milliwatts of power. 

The network has been used with a variety of systems, he said, including the Cyberlight fixed-wing unmanned aircraft, a small rotorcraft UAS and the wheeled Spybot ground vehicle. 

Dan Isaac of Spain's Dei
mos Space, said his company is planning a control system to connect a wide variety of unmanned aircraft, allowing them to be controlled by an air traffic controller no matter which company built them. 

The system, named GEMA, is "something we're trying to see if we can bring to the UAS market," he said. GEMA would allow an air traffic controller to operate a vehicle if it has lost its link to the ground, which could help with efforts to fly UAS in public airspace. 

"We're proposing to create an additional layer [of control] called Master UCS [UAV] control system", he said. 

The vehicle-specific systems would feed into the Master UCS, which would allow them to talk to other control systems, he said. The UCS would get input from the various vehicle control systems, including the number vehicles available for operation, their status and their payload capacity.

"If approved, these recommendations will profoundly reform how this department does business," Gates said at a Pentagon briefing. "Let me be clear: I would have made virtually all of the decisions and recommendations announced today regardless of the department's top line budget number." 

One change is to increase the amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for warfighters to the tune of $2 billion, he said. Gates has complained since last year that the services took too long to get additional ISR capability into the field. 

The $2 billion will include "fielding and sustaining 50 Predator-class unmanned aerial vehicle orbits by FY '11 and maximizing their production," he said. "This capability, which has been in such high demand in both Iraq and Afghanistan, will now be permanently funded in the base budget [instead of in budget supplementals]. It will represent a 62 percent increase in capability over the current level and 127 percent from over a year ago." 

The budget will add one additional Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) in fiscal 2010, going from two to three. The LCS has a strong unmanned component as part of its modular "mission package" design. Eventually the Navy plans to buy 55 of the ships. 

Future Combat Systems 

In addition to some big-ticket program cuts - such as eliminating the new VH-71 presidential helicopter program, ending production of the F-22 fighter and scaling back the missile defense program - Gates said the Army's Future Combat Systems will be "significantly restructured." 

"We will retain and accelerate the initial increment of the program to spin out technology enhancements to all combat brigades," he said, apparently good news for iRobot's Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle and Honeywell's Micro Air Vehicle, both part of FCS' first technology "spin-out" plan. 

However, Gates said the FCS program's current vehicle plan doesn't reflect lessons learned from counterinsurgency and close-quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan so he wants to cancel it and relaunch it under a competitive bidding process. The vehicle package includes eight manned vehicles and four unmanned ones, three based on Lockheed Martin's MULE and one being the SUGV. 

In a statement, Lockheed Martin said, "today, secretary Gates announced the Department of Defense's priorities for the future. Several Lockheed Martin programs, including F-22, F-35, VH-71, LCS, and TSAT were discussed. We're assessing the impact of the secretary of defense's decisions on all affected programs. As we move forward with the budget process, Lockheed Martin will continue to support our customers and work to deliver affordable solutions that meet their strategic and operational needs." 

The Obama Administration's fiscal 2010 budget request will now go before Congress, where it's certain to undergo intense scrutiny.

The procurement potential is evaluated at dozens of million USD, in accordance with IDF's requirements and procurement process. 

Elbit Systems' Skylark I LE has been selected by the IDF following an extensive evaluation process, including operational ability to answer the high requirements of the IDF, based on its rich operational experience.  

The Skylark I LE is based on the accumulated experience acquired by the Skylark I in thousands of operational hours performed in various battlefields, including Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. Elbit Systems' UAV family has served the IDF in recent years in counter terror missions and took an operational part in Israel's second Lebanon War. The upgraded UAV includes additional unique features, to significantly improve its operational capabilities and offers the IDF a highly advanced UAV.  

Haim Kellerman, General Manager of Elbit Systems UAV Division said: "We take great pride in being selected by the Ministry of Defense for this important IDF project. This selection attests to the acknowledgement of this UAV's professional maturity and unique capabilities, and strengthens our position as a leading UAV supplier in Israel and worldwide." Kellerman added: "We have witnessed great interest among numerous defense forces in the export model of the Skylark I LE  and we expect that many other customers will follow the IDF in its selection of this Elbit Systems UAV."