ONR’s Autonomous Aerial Cargo Utility System will be platform agnostic, but some of Lockheed Martin’s cutting edge automated flight technology has already been demonstrated on the K-MAX unmanned
Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $13.5 million contract to explore highly advanced autonomous technologies aboard an unmanned vertical take-off and landing aircraft. Under the contract, Lockheed Martin and a team of industry, government and academic partners will develop a technology that will enable aircraft to operate under supervisory control. A human operator will interact with the system at a high level while low level control is left to automation. The resulting technology will have the potential to improve the utility and effectiveness of currently unmanned vertical take-off and landing aircraft, as well as offer pilots supplemental decision aids on legacy manned platforms.
During this first 18-month phase of the five-year effort, the team will demonstrate the capabilities of its Open-Architecture Planning and Trajectory Intelligence for Managing Unmanned Systems (OPTIMUS) architecture. OPTIMUS is designed to be platform-agnostic, drawing from Lockheed Martin’s experience with the unmanned K-MAX cargo resupply program and the combined teams’ expertise in the fields of sensing, autonomy and human-machine interaction.
Some of the cutting edge technology has already been demonstrated on K-MAX for the Army’s Autonomous Technologies for Unmanned Air System program, and is now deployed in Afghanistan on the aircraft of the Marine Corps.
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