COTS and Open Standards Drive UAS Control Station Architectures

Designers of control stations for unmanned vehicles primarily use commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) embedded products, but there has never been a common architecture developed for all UAS ground control stations.

However, U.S. military planners are pushing toward a common control segment architecture that requires all UAS control stations to work with one set of standards and hardware and software architecture to save costs.

Military and Aerospace Electronics Magazine dedicated a special report on this subject – click here for the full article – an extract is reprinted here:

Officials at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in the Department of Defense (DOD) are looking to change that and have formed a working group called the Unmanned Control Systems, Control Segment, or UCS, to drive open standards in UAV ground stations thereby more efficiently managing costs in the long term, says George Romanski, chief executive officer of Verocel in Westford, Mass. It is an open committee, but limited to U.S. citizens, and focused on UAV programs that are 20 pounds and above, Romanski explains.

The DOD also wants to use the term control segment instead of ground control station because the ground control station may be on a ship, truck, etc., Romanski adds. “The UCS working group activities are focus on defining and demonstrating the architecture and standards for future UAV ground control systems,” says Michael Leahy, CMMS Program Manager at Northrop Grumman. “That effort is not designing a specific instantiation of that architecture. Northrop Grumman is on contract to support the activities of the OSD UCS working group.”

“The DOD is fed up with paying for specific control segments especially in the current budgetary environment in Washington,” Romanski continues. Each Global Hawk, Predator, and other UAVs have their own control station with its own unique hardware and software configurations that are often quite different from platform to platform. The DOD wants to develop a uniform standard for the software architecture used to cut down on costs in the long run.”

Hence, they are “getting serious about an open business model, where an ecosystem of suppliers can evolve and develop services that can be integrated into a control segment,” Romanski says.  “The UCS has defined a large infrastructure of specifications, uses cases, and is working towards defining a platform-independent model that may be used by a program of record to implement a platform specific model or platform dependent model.  The services are loosely coupled, which enables organization and structuring of the underlying architecture using the services selected from a hopefully, growing repository.“

The user working group worked for the first year to establish a proposed architecture description, “in other words what it should look like,” Romanski says The architecture will be finished by the end of this year, and then followed by the platform dependent models, he continues. “The platform dependent models will take the architecture and adapt it to the individual platforms. The result will be that each platform is using the common standards set out by the committee.”

“The model is being defined by the UCS-WG and phase 2 is expected to be completed at the end of this year,” Romanski continues.  “It means that vendors who currently supply the flying platforms will no longer develop control segments which are specific to the vehicle to which they are linked. One control segment will be able to control many different types of vehicles.

“The work is progressing well,” Romanski says.  “We are not only working the architecture side, but also addressing the safety and security certification needs. “The defined architecture will have various interfaces based on NATO STANAG 4585, which is specifically designed for UAV interface systems,” he continues. “All the services will be interlinked and you can construct a system of choice by putting together the services you need.”

Andrew Hipperson, director of business development for video and display solutions at Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing in Hartfordshire, England, says “When it comes to operating systems — Linux and even Windows are being used. We run Linux on all our systems, but we still see SPARC with Solaris, but Linux has taken over wholesale unless real-time functionality is required then you get a traditional real-time operating system (RTOS) from Wind River, Green Hills Software or LynuxWorks.”  Themis’s Smith says. “It is primarily Linux for embedded systems