1. 12 | UNMANNED SYSTEMS | JUNE 2015
In recent months, enthusiasm from the
U.S. Navy toward the future of un-
manned systems has been palpable,
and it seeks to move toward full robotic
system autonomy working in collabora-
tion with manned teams.
“We need to get aggressive about
the future of robotics and autonomy,”
said Brig. Gen. Kevin Killea at the Navy
League’s annual Sea-Air-Space Exhibi-
tion in April. “I believe that this begins
with success in the areas of advanced
perception, multilevel cognitive reason-
ing and the resulting advancements that
come with autonomous behaviors in
those two areas.”
Killea, who is the vice chief of naval
research and the commanding general
of the Marine Corp Warfighting Lab,
stressed the importance for unmanned
systems to be able to autonomously
make decisions and react to the envi-
ronment to reduce the load carried
by warfighters.
“We can move away from man in the
loop to supervised autonomy so that
we can reduce the physical and cogni-
tive loads of the Marines that these
systems are going to be teamed with,”
said Killea.
Brig. Gen. Karsten Heckl echoed
Killea’s sentiments, focusing on the
2015
Autonomous
Systems to Become
New Normal for Navy
By Scott Kesselman
Sea Air Space

2. JUNE 2015 | UNMANNED SYSTEMS | 13
Photo:NorthropGrummanCorp.
potential of unmanned aircraft systems
to assist troops.
“I don’t know why we limit how we
think about unmanned,” said Heckl. “Air-
borne early warning, medevac — think
about that. The solutions are limitless.”
For the Navy, Heckl stressed the
importance of shipboard-compatible
solutions. Tier five medium- and high-
altitude, long-endurance systems, such
as the MQ-9 Reaper, don’t currently
meet that requirement.
“We’re clearly all in with group three,
the small tactical UAS. … I think that
with technology, with industry assis-
tance, I would say that the horizons are
long and wide,” said Heckl.
He also expressed interest in
DARPA’s Tactically Exploited Recon-
naissance Node program to fulfill this
need, which recently moved into phase
two, with DARPA awarding contracts
to AeroVironment Inc. and Northrop
Grumman Corp. TERN seeks to give
small ships the ability to launch and re-
cover medium-altitude, long-endurance
unmanned aircraft systems.
For air, the enthusiasm was some-
what dampened by Rear Adm. Mark
Butt, who is in charge of procurement,
development and sustainment of capa-
bilities across all domains for the U.S.
Coast Guard.
“The Coast Guard is not all into UAS
yet,” he said.
He went on to explain that the Federal
Aviation Administration’s certificate of
authorization process for public, domes-
tic UAS to gain access to the airspace
and extreme weather scenarios limits
the usefulness of UAS in rapid response
scenarios for the Coast Guard.
In order to circumvent similar issues
with unmanned underwater vehicles
and unmanned surface vessels, Butt
explained potential solutions to avoiding
rules established in reaction to events
and promoting innovation in robotic
maritime applications.
“I suggest industry take the lead
in developing regulations for those
mission spaces, because if there’s an
event that causes a reaction, it’s going
to drive the cost.”
Involvement from industry and other
partners is another key component.
“Unmanned capabilities being ex-
plored by other government agencies,
academia and industry are crucial to
informing and shaping future Marine
Corps requirements and capability
development,” said Killea.
“For the true revolution in military
affairs to happen here, I think that
remotely piloted, man-in-the-loop sys-
tems will quickly become a thing of the
past,” Killea continued. “By achieving
true autonomy, we will be able to ex-
ploit the benefits of swarming systems,
effective persistent counter unmanned
systems as well as with unmanned
casevac and medevac.”
There are results in these areas
right now. In April, the Office of Naval
Research released a video of a recent
demonstration of autonomous swarming
UAS. Multiple UAS were launched from
a tube and flew in formation as part of
the Low-Cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
Swarming Technology program.
In April, the Navy also successfully
completed aerial refueling of the un-
manned X-47B.
“Think of the complexity of that,” said
U.S. Navy Program Executive Officer for
Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons
Mark Darrah. “The idea that we go to
the right place in space, then we would
rendezvous with the tanker, feel the seat
of the basket, get the system ready to
receive fuel, get to precontact, enter the
basket, push the hose in, and release
the one-way check valve to release the
fuel and then exit safely. That’s a very
complicated proposition.”
Not as complicated as what is in store
further down the road. Killea, Darrah
and ONR Director Matt Winter all looked
toward alternative technologies com-
ing out of synthetic biology and neural
networks science to achieve advanced
autonomous functionality and coopera-
tion across unmanned assets.
“Networked cooperative systems
will need to have the ability to au-
tonomously coordinate their actions in
response to the dynamic events of a
conflict,” said Killea. “The key here is
how those systems will communicate.
This will be an area of great develop-
ment in autonomous systems mov-
ing forward. For swarming to work, I
don’t think we can be dependent on
the RF [radio frequency] spectrum. So
we’ll need a way for them to passively
communicate or potentially a method
of sensing between the systems. They
have a change in their environment,
and they understand without having to
directly communicate what their next
steps or actions will be. That’s kind of
like how termites work.”
Although the officers were unsure how
exactly this would be accomplished,
they described a scenario where when
one robotic asset senses a change in the
environment, it would drop some sort
of flag to let other assets know that the
environment and therefore future mission
directives have changed.
“I agree with [Killea]. We cannot rely
on RF. I want to know why the albatross
is able to fly 3,000 miles and go back to
its nest and get that navigation into an
unmanned system,” says Darrah.
The robots would be designed to
make their own informed decisions;
however, would still be under the purview
of human oversight for serious decisions.
“Humans must be kept in the loop,
particularly in regard to use of force …
and with actions that could lead to es-
calations of crisis,” said Killea. “Human-
machine teaming will be the approach.”
The X-47B unmanned aircraft lines up with a tanker
during a successful aerial refueling demonstration in April.
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