WASHINGTON, Oct. 9, 2012 – The Office of Naval Research has awarded a $13.5 million contract to an industry team led by Lockheed Martin ...
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9, 2012 – The Office of Naval Research has awarded a $13.5 million contract to an industry team led by Lockheed Martin to explore highly advanced autonomous technologies aboard an unmanned vertical take-off and landing aircraft.
Under the contract, Lockheed Martin and a team of industry, government, and academic partners will develop a technology that will enable aircraft to operate under supervisory control. A human operator will interact with the system at a high level while low level control is left to the automation.
The resulting technology will have the potential to improve the utility and effectiveness of current unmanned vertical take-off and landing aircraft, as well as offer pilots supplemental decision aids on legacy manned platforms.
During this first, 18-month phase of the five-year effort, the team will demonstrate the capabilities of its Open-Architecture Planning and Trajectory Intelligence for Managing Unmanned Systems (OPTIMUS) architecture. OPTIMUS is designed to be platform-agnostic, drawing from Lockheed Martin’s experience with the unmanned K-MAX cargo resupply program and the combined teams’ expertise in the fields of sensing, autonomy and human-machine interaction.
