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Developers of the Unmanned Combat Armed Rotorcraft (UCAR) have demonstrated critical technologies needed to realize their vision for an autonomous battlefield scout and attack helicopter, but uncertainty still lingers over the project's future.

The goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa)-led initiative is essentially to devise a system that could independently find targets, even armed individuals, and attack them, with human controllers providing only the most basic instructions. At the same time, the price for each stealthy unmanned helicopter is supposed to be no more than $8 million, with support costs a fraction of a comparable manned system like the AH-64 Apache.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have been working with Darpa to show that technologies are available to realize the vision; the two companies also head teams designing UCAR air vehicles (see story on p. 48). "Even if we only achieve a fraction of our vision, we will have improved the capability of the Army immensely," contends Northrop Grumman program manager Gregory R. Zwernemann.

To focus initial research and development activities and funding, Darpa identified four areas it believed were critical to the program's success: autonomy and collaboration of the air vehicles, low-level autonomous flight, affordability and survivability, and target recognition. Those technologies are now more advanced than first projected, says Donald Woodbury, Darpa's program manager. In these areas, the project has completed component testing to reach NASA's Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4 standard.

Technical progress notwithstanding, the U.S. Army, which co-sponsors the effort and has been tapped as the future customer, wants to pull its money from the project to spend it on other things. One industry official argued the move reflects operational bills the service is facing, as well as a lack of clear vision in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) arena. The Army has repeatedly changed course on UAVs.

A long-time UAV observer notes that it wouldn't be the first time civilian Pentagon officials have had to salvage an unmanned aircraft project. Both the Global Hawk and Predator UAVs were born largely through the support of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, rather than a military service.

The program could also be rescued through brewing U.S. Navy interest. The service has indicated it may want to operate UCARs from its future littoral combat ships, Woodbury says. During the next phase, a Navy and U.S. Marine Corps scenario would be exercised.

However, until the funding issue is resolved Darpa will hold off on choosing either Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman to continue the program. The decision on who will proceed into the $160-million third phase was slated for October.

One key feature of both competitors' UCAR approaches is a three-beam laser radar (ladar) obstacle avoidance system, which has undergone preliminary design review. A brass-board version would fly next year. Each UCAR would be fitted with two sensors for 360-deg. coverage. The ladar should be able to detect power lines and allow a UCAR to see and avoid other aircraft, Woodbury says. The information from the obstacle avoidance system would be fed to the UCAR's computer to cause it to take evasive action as needed. Northrop Grumman and FiberTech are devising the system for both teams.