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RedditIn military circles, it’s common these days to hear the virtues of unmanned aerial vehicles touted in Pentagon speeches and trade show pamphlets. According to the prophets, UAVs will soon be flying missions on their own, dodging aircraft, tracking terrorists, and sparing the U.S. Air Force the cost of recruiting and training actual pilots. But first someone has to develop the software to make the miracles come true. So when the people who program UAVs make a real breakthrough, it’s worth noting.
In late June, over the course of two days of flight demonstrations, a team from Boeing launched a trio of ScanEagle UAVs and, under the minimal guidance of a single human controller, let them fly missions on their own. The ground controller commanded the robotic craft to search for and track moving vehicles on the ground, then sat back to let them decide how best to accomplish their mission—including how to avoid being seen or heard by the targets.
ScanEagles, unlike joystick-controlled craft like Predators, already fly autonomously. Typically, one operator sets waypoints for the airplane to follow, while another controls the payload—a camera mounted on a turret. In June, a single operator controlled three aircraft simultaneously, taking the place of six people. He was able to do this because the aircraft were programmed to pick their own routes, divide up the terrain to be scanned, then find and follow targets without receiving any direct commands.
The demonstrations of the new software, called Distributed Information-Centralized Decision (DI-CD, or “diced”), were an unqualified success. That’s good news for Marshall Williams, the Boeing Advanced Systems program manager who taught this small flock of ScanEagles how to fly. Williams says it’s all about creating programs that respond to the way humans communicate, instead of training people to translate commands so computers can understand them. “It’s a whole new way of telling them what to do,” he says. “You tell them, I need pictures of those things in this space.”
In his more than 20 years at Boeing, Williams has worked on several software-intensive projects, including the F-35 Lightning, F-22 Raptor, and other secret programs he declines to identify. The June tests were the culmination of nearly four years of his team’s work on developing the software that runs UAVs.
“Many software engineers never get to see their technology flight tested,” he says. “I was able to take some of our young talent from the idea [stage] to the flight test…I was charged.”
On June 20, a group of company VIPs and customers (the identities of which Boeing declined to specify, citing industry competition) took their seats in a building at the company’s high-desert test facility in Boardman, Oregon. A mile away, in a mobile command unit, the three ScanEagles launched as they always do—catapulted into the air with specially designed trebuchets. Air Force operators waited nearby, ready to take control in case the software lost control of the aircraft.
Out in the desert, far below the ScanEagles, were several moving trucks. The ground operator, using an Advanced Warning and Control System (AWACS) control panel, gave each ScanEagle its basic instructions: Find and follow the first truck. While one ScanEagle followed the truck, a staffer playing the part of field observer used a cell phone to tell the AWACS operator of a new, time-sensitive target—a second truck.
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