Jane Edwards
General Atomics’ aeronautical systems business used an MQ-20 Avenger unmanned aircraft to demonstrate its open standards-based autonomy architecture for unmanned combat air vehicles and a U.S. government-owned communications capability, dubbed Waveform X, during a flight test in November.
The live test flight held at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.’s flight operations facility in El Mirage, California, used three L3Harris Technologies-built software-defined radios to support command and control, line of sight and data movement capabilities through the nonproprietary Waveform X platform, the company said Tuesday.
GA-ASI created an IP-based mesh network by integrating an L3Harris Pantera SDR with MQ-20 and a ground-based SDR with the third software-defined radio from L3Harris, Banshee 2, as part of the mission control element.
Through the demonstration, GA-ASI also showed its commitment to further developing autonomous collaborative platform technologies using the drone.
“This flight underscores GA-ASI’s commitment to proving combat operational readiness for defense contractor products such as L3Harris’ Pantera and BANSHEE 2 radios, as well as open, vendor-agnostic autonomy architecture for UCAV platforms,” said Michael Atwood, vice president of advanced programs at GA-ASI.
“This most recent test shows multi-service compatibility of the autonomy core through the integration of USAF and Navy software skills, bringing us one step closer to government-owned, skills based interservice ecosystem for ACPs,” added Atwood.
