Phase II year
2023
(last award dollars: 1729500686)
Phase II Amount
$1,499,998
The Sequential Phase II builds upon the work completed under Army SBIR Topic #A19-071, Weather Situational Awareness in the Cockpit, which focuses on providing graphical environmental intelligence (EI) in the cockpit of tactical aircraft. Under this subsequent Phase II effort, PEMDAS proposes to develop a prototype Distributed Maritime Operations Environmental Intelligence (DMO-EI) system to support Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard manned and unmanned Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms and missions. Using the prototype machine-to-machine capabilities currently being established in the Army SBIR, PEMDAS will expand the flight envelope of environmental situational awareness from low altitudes supporting the Army to middle and high altitudes common to Navy manned and unmanned aviation operations. Further, situational awareness will be expanded and tailored to meet the dynamic environmental concerns beyond icing to include turbulence, lightning, and high-altitude jet stream winds. Additionally, airborne atmospheric sensors will be adapted to designated manned and unmanned platform to demonstrate the operational utility of sensing to provide real threat warnings and displays to pilots and operators. The prototype DMO-EI will employ machine-to-machine processing to derive Navy mission decision products to improve success and enhance survivability. Examples of decision products are real-time cloud and icing layers, cloud-free line-of-sight ranges, localized winds, and lightning. This sequential SBIR will also initiate application of basic artificial intelligence (AI) concepts to generate predictive mission information capabilities for autonomous platforms. PEMDAS proposes to execute this subsequent SBIR effort through four major technical objectives. Technical Objective (TO 1) will design the prototype DMO-EI system relevant to Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard ISR platforms and missions. Technical Objective (TO 2) will build and test prototypes for the DMO-EI subsystems: Collect and Store, Process, and Interoperability. Enhanced subsystems will be integrated into a complete prototype DMO-EI system and tested. Technical Objective (TO 3) will enhance and integrate the PEMDAS Atmospheric Sensing and Prediction System (ASAPS) to improve situational awareness on Government-selected manned and unmanned airframes. This sequential SBIR will conclude with delivery of a subset of the EI decision support products outlined in TO 1 in real time. The specific systems the prototype DMO-EI system will integrate will be determined based on availability of Navy/Marine Corps/Coast Guard assets.
Benefit: The 2020 Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard Tri-service Strategy, Advantage at Sea Prevailing With Integrated All-Domain Naval Power, describes a maritime Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR) framework reliant upon a multi-domain portfolio of shore-launched and sea-launched unmanned platforms. These unmanned ISR platforms will perform scouting, targeting, communications, and battle damage assessment in support of maritime domain awareness across all altitudes from surface to 60,000 feet. Further, the range and flight duration of these platforms to support multi-domain awareness must be counted in the thousands of miles and hundreds of hours as the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard innovate and adapt to face the growing challenges presented by China and other actors in and near the Pacific Ocean. To meet these challenges, the Chief of Naval Research (CNR) has set the following priorities: (1) cutting-edge unmanned capabilities to support and complement existing platforms; (2) improve maritime domain awareness; and (3) asset protection. As the 2020 Tri-service strategy is implemented to support the Pivot to the Pacific, a multi-domain fleet of new and current platforms, both manned and unmanned, will face the challenges of operating in this vast geographical region. These sequential SBIR technologies will overcome the challenges this large fleet of platforms will face operating in these weather data devoid regions and improve pilot/operator situational awareness, heighten crew safety in the combat battlespace, and protect key assets such as aircraft and high value sensor systems. The expanding number of autonomous unmanned platforms and manned assets provides a viable commercial path for the Department of Defense to integrate these Phase II technologies. It also lays the groundwork for other federal and state agencies to benefit from the work performed under this sequential SBIR. There is also a clear pathway to transfer these technologies from the DoD to private or commercial aviation, the growing autonomous drone delivery market, and the nascent urban air mobility sector. The thousands of commercial and general aviation (GA) aircraft would benefit from enhanced safety and more efficient flight operations saving fuel, time, and operational costs. The autonomous drone delivery and urban air mobility sectors will require real-time, high fidelity environmental information to ensure their suite of sensors are not compromised by adverse weather. Finally, these prototyped technologies could also bring decision support products to the cockpits of aviators or augment current commercial weather applications.
Keywords: Autonomous, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Environmental Intelligence (EI), Decision Support Products, Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance (ISR)
