’s small unmanned aerial systems team successfully completed a capabilities demonstration of BlueHalo’s, American-made Group 1 sUAS for Defense Innovation Unit at a DoD facility in California. BlueHalo was recently awarded a contract to participate in DIU’s Blue 2.0 Prototype OTA effort, designed to streamline government acquisition of approved NDAA compliant UAS platforms.
This collaborative effort is being funded by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers/U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center.
This initial demonstration was successful in providing DIU with information to perform analysis on NDAA compliance, evaluate various payload configurations, verify scripted and ad-hoc flight demonstration profiles, and observe operational safety of flight procedures. BlueHalo satisfied DIU’s requirements through the demonstration of five sUAS platforms of two configurations with nearly five hours of operations.
The BlueHalo team met all demo requirements, which included demonstrating preflight procedures, mission planning and launch through the GUI interface, building waypoint patterns for five UAS, range and endurance verification, mission modes, and lost link procedures. To conclude the event, a series of DIU ad-hoc requests were satisfied. These requests involved integrating payload systems, observing maximum duration and payload capacity capability, demonstrating additional range tests of vehicle and radio systems, observing manual flight characteristics, mixing and matching sUAS failsafe modes, and modifying waypoint missions on the fly.
“The DIU demonstration is a great example of BlueHalo’s commitment to the warfighter and our innovations in UAS platforms, payloads, and the broader ecosystem of autonomy from AI/ML swarm logic to advanced multi-domain command and control,” said Jonathan Moneymaker, BlueHalo CEO. “I am incredibly proud of the team’s success and am excited in how we continue to redefine what is possible through inspired engineering.”
“BlueHalo embraces the opportunity to work with DIU in making rapid and meaningful innovation available to Warfighters,” said Jimmy Jenkins, BlueHalo President and General Manager for Air and Missile Defense and C4ISR. “Our investment in creating high-performance, American-made sUAS solutions has the potential to truly transform the unmanned systems market.”
Source: Press Release