Unmanned aerial systems soar high with promise of new technology and development

By Juan Miguel Pedraza
Students steeped in the digital games and gadgets culture will feel like they’ve scored the ultimate ride in UND Aerospace Dean Bruce Smith’s new universe of high-tech, computer-controlled, and remotely operated aircraft.

Welcome to the University of North Dakota’s latest extreme global enterprise:  unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and the cross-disciplinary, multi-college Center of Excellence program that Dr. Smith and his UND colleagues are fast-tracking to support research, teaching, and learning in this hot new aviation technology.  The term UAS encompasses the actual aircraft, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

“We couldn’t be more excited about this opportunity,” said Smith, a former UND All-American football player and now head of the UND John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences.  “UAS has leaped to the forefront of aviation research.  This provides a completely different track from what we’ve already got going on here in aerospace sciences.”

Officially organized as the Center of Excellence for Economic Development in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and UAV Simulation Applications (UAV COE), this program incorporates expertise and research capabilities in Aerospace Sciences, the School of Engineering and Mines, the College of Nursing through its new Northern Plains Center for Behavioral Research, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the College of Business and Public Administration’s Center for Innovation.

“This project attracts a whole new kind of student,” said Smith, a former airline industry executive and aviation safety and instructional design expert who spent eight years teaching Air Force pilots how to fly.  “Today, we have these kids thoroughly into computer games, thoroughly ingrained in computer simulations and virtual worlds.  They love aviation but they don’t necessarily want to be in the cockpit or be an air traffic controller.  With UAS, they can sit at a console and fly airplanes all day.”

The new research-based Center of Excellence also will provide tremendous opportunities for scientists and students, especially in engineering, who want to be involved in both aerospace and in day-to-day science.

“UAS is absolutely the ideal choice for them,” said Smith, who pointed to a broad array of technological and scientific challenges that will keep researchers busy for years.

“On the engineering side, you’ve got payloads, sensors, composites, and aircraft design,” Smith explained.  “On the basic research side, you’re looking at the big problem of sense-and-avoid and the theoretical problems involved in tasking these aircraft, such as optimal mission design and control.  These present phenomenal research opportunities.”

The UAS program is already on track to produce a teaching curriculum — an undergraduate major — and it has both short-term and long-term research agendas that aim to put UND squarely in the midst of this technology’s vital national strategic development, Smith said.

“It didn’t hurt that we got $5.2 million in 2006 federal funding to kick this off, plus $3 million already earmarked for fiscal 2007 (which began Oct. 1),” said Smith, who’s clearly animated as he shows a PowerPoint presentation about the UAV COE.  “A major part of this is the research element, so it ties into UND graduate programs.  We’ve built a Center of Excellence here that encompasses a very broad constituency of researchers, teachers, and students.”

Smith said UND’s work related to the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) committee for the Grand Forks Air Force Base (GFAFB) initiated its keen interest and participation in the national UAS research enterprise.

“We brought our flight school and UND into the equation for the BRAC to consider,” Smith said.  “The committee decided not only to keep the tanker mission at GFAFB but also to realign its mission and bring UAVs to the base.”

Another key piece of the UAS program is Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) funding that’s funneled through the Center of Excellence in General Aviation, Smith noted.

“The FAA is interested in having us study national airspace issues, including those that are critical when you have unmanned airplanes flying around up there amid commercial aircraft and general aviation (everything else that uses the airspace besides commercial and military aviation).”

To launch a research program into the airspace issues, shortly after the BRAC decision to retask the base for a UAS mission, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., wrote a defense appropriations measure.

“He came up with the UAS COE (Center of Excellence) for us which also integrates issues relating to the security of the northern border,” Smith said.  “So you have three central research questions integrating UAS into the national airspace: navigating and controlling UAVs, airspace management, and you have the Department of Defense looking at homeland security and related technology.”

Underpinning the whole effort is a core jobs issue.  “Gov. John Hoeven views UAS and UND as an economic development engine,” Smith said.

Sense-and-avoid technology
Among the many research issues being tackled by the UND UAV COE is sense-and-avoid, according to Dr. Richard Schultz, associate professor and chair of electrical engineering, and Dr. William Semke, associate professor of mechanical engineering.  They and several of their students are members of the UAS research mission.

“You have to be able to operate the UAV safely when it flies among general aviation and commercial aircraft in the national airspace,” said Semke.  “We are designing a payload with the instruments and sensors needed to replace the human in the aircraft who would see — and avoid — any type of moving target, such as a parachutist, a small airplane, anything up there that isn’t equipped with a transponder or other device signaling its presence.

A flock of birds, for example.
“One of the interesting areas of basic research related to UAS that we might be looking at is in biology, in birds and flocks of birds, where they go, where they stop, what they eat.  Some of the unmanned technology could contribute to this type of basic research in ways that traditional research methods do not,” said Dr. Martha Potvin, dean of UND’s College of Arts and Sciences and herself a biologist.

“The UAS project brings the College of Arts and Sciences a wonderful opportunity to expand our behavioral sciences group, and to work with aviation, space studies, and nursing, and expand those collaborations,” said Potvin.  “Thus, we focus not only on the technology but also on the people who operate that technology.”

For example, Dr. Tom Petros, Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of Psychology, said his piece of the UAS research is to design human studies that look at factors that would influence how well UAV operators perform.

“I’ve been involved in human factors work in aviation for a few years, looking at areas such as fatigue and alcohol hangover,” said Petros.  “Many of the same things that affect aircraft pilots will affect UAV pilots or operators.  There will be some different things, too, but basically we’ll be looking at the impact of the human performance element in UAS.”

Dr. Francis “Ric” Ferraro, professor of psychology, has a similar role.  “My part of the UAS mission is to evaluate the people who will serve as the pilots on the ground.  They’re actually flying the aircraft, but they’re not physically in the cockpit.  We’ll be looking at the basic human factors, what influences people flying the UAVs,” said Ferraro.  “This is a different kind of aviation — there’s no one in the cockpit.  So we want to learn how the pilots on the ground process information and make decisions.”

Ferraro, a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and Petros will work closely with Dr. Glenda Lindseth, director of research and professor of nursing.  She has done extensive behavioral research with pilots.

“It’s real important to aerospace,” said Lindseth.  “They figure that 80 percent of all accidents in flying occur because of a breakdown in human factors.  That’s where my research comes in.  I’ve done prior funded research with my husband (Dr. Paul Lindseth, associate dean of Aerospace Sciences) and with Dr. Tom Petros looking at pilots and their performance, diet and also airsickness as factors in the cockpit.  In the UAS work, we’d be looking at what’s going on in ground control, that is, the pilots on the ground who are flying the UAVs.

“We know that a person might shoot down an aircraft in a combat zone and at the end of the workday go home to be with their children,” said Lindseth.  “We want to understand how their work impacts their personal lives.  We don’t know too much about that right now.  That’s something that our area of the Center of Excellence would work on, as well as how we care for pilots to help them achieve optimum performance.”

Smith expects that UND researchers will develop onboard sensing equipment that will make autonomous sense-and-avoid capabilities a UAS reality.

 In fact, when it comes to a broad and fully integrated aerospace training, learning, and research program, “nobody does what we do,” Smith said.  And with the inclusion of a multidisciplinary UAS program that spans four UND colleges, state and federal governments, and prospective commercial partners, “this is what a ‘center of excellence’ is all about.”

Super-eyes in the sky
Dr. Richard Schultz, associate professor and chair of electrical engineering, was recently awarded $457,985 from the U.S. Army Research Office for a three-year project to develop higher resolution techniques that sharpen video captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and to help with automatic target recognition and tracking.

“The project is called ‘Real-Time Super-Resolution ATR of UAV-Based Reconnaissance and Surveillance Imagery,’ and we’re excited to be part of the overall UAS research effort,” said Schultz.  UAVs are robotic airplanes that can be used for military and homeland security intelligence gathering.  Schultz’s research project involves image processing and analysis that aims to see details more sharply in video captured by UAV sensors.  For example, this could help a UAV tasked with a homeland defense mission to automatically see and track a target.

In movies about national security such as Patriot Games and Enemy of the State, it seems rather easy to zoom in on people, buildings, and vehicles found in satellite and airborne surveillance images, Schultz notes.  But, he explained, “if you use the magnification tool found in any image processing software package to zoom in on a picture from your digital camera, you will see just how blocky the pixels really are.

“By exploiting the movement between multiple frames in a video sequence,” he continued, “it’s possible to extract extra details from digital video frames that are not visible within any single digital camera picture.  The movement of the UAV payload imager, with respect to the ground, can be exploited in this very same manner to enhance surveillance and reconnaissance video footage.”