Wise eyes in the sky: The autogyro that collects intelligent images

In practice, the autogyros of the time were not easy to fly. During the shooting of the film in 1967, Little Nellie's rotor severed a cameraman's foot as downdraft from the filming helicopters destabilised the autogyro. Indeed, until recently, flying clubs, while happy to hire out fixed wing aircraft and helicopters to trained pilots, would not do so with autogyros on account of their accident record. They were invented by Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva and first flew in 1923. His principle was to have an aircraft powered by a propeller to provide thrust and the resulting airflow would cause an unpowered rotor to rotate and provide lift. It does require a certain airspeed to maintain this rotation and resultant lift, without which autogyros tend to crash – resulting in their poor safety reputation. The Falcon flies Modern autogyros are a different proposition and one of the latest is making game changing claims about its role for surveillance. In part, this is due to the design of the flying platform itself, but moreover it is down to the associated technology involved in capturing information and delivering it in instant and actionable formats. The platform is the Falcon IS (or Falcon ISTAR for military purposes) and a major feature is that it is an OPV – an optionally piloted vehicle. For training purposes, it can have two seats, as shown in the model featured on the cover of this issue. But in its operational form, it either a single seater or controlled from the ground. DCS is the Bahrain based company which developed the Falcon IS system and launched it during the circuit of air shows in the Middle East at the start of 2014. A guiding philosophy for the company was to provide a cost effective option for surveillance and it estimates that, in terms of purchasing and running the Falcon IS, it is at least five times cheaper than equivalent operations using a helicopter. Vital statistics for the Falcon IS include a length of 5.5m and height of less than 3m; not that different from the Mercedes Sprinter van that provided the ground support during the Bahrain Air Show demo. Its weight when empty is 325kg, only a tenth of the weight of the van, and maximum weight is 600kg. Allowing for pilot and fuel, it is clearly not an aircraft intended to bear a significant payload. Top speed is 190km/hr and the minimum speed is 30km/hr, but this is the air speed – the speed of the vehicle relative to the air – so, with skilful flying and an air speed of more than 30km/hr, the Falcon can virtually hover by pointing into the wind. It also means that into the wind it only requires a very short distance – only a few tens of metres - to get to take off speed. Despite the allure of Falcon IS as a mode of transport, it is the additional technology that sets it apart. James Latta, senior engineer at Lockheed Martin, was responsible for the intelligence processing system that he named Theia, after the Greek goddess of sight. He explained that Falcon IS was not just an aircraft, but also a complete surveillance system. The autogyro is the flying platform – "a tool to get sensors up in the air and get a better view of things," according to Latta. The multi sensor is supplied by Wescam in the form of its MX-10 turret. This is the smallest in the company's range, selected because having a height of just 14in is important on an aircraft with limited ground clearance. "What is revolutionary about the MX-10 is the performance it has squeezed into a package of that size," observed Latta. Up to six sensors can be supported on the turret to provide high definition imaging from electro-optical and/or infra-red (EO/IR) cameras. All sensors can operate simultaneously. The thermal imager offers 440 x 512 resolution and a field of view varying from 30° to 1.8°. A daylight continuous zoom TV has a 5Mpixel colour sensor, while a low light continuous zoom camera has a mono electron multiplied CCD sensor. There is also a laser rangefinder with a wavelength of 1.54µm and a maximum range of 20km, and two laser illuminators; one wide beam, one narrow. Device stabilisation, crucial when picture quality is the core function of the system, is provided by a four axis gimbal set with its own IMU – the inertial measurement unit. IMUs use gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure and report on velocity and orientation. They are frequently used for control in unmanned aircraft and spacecraft and can also perform the same function as GPS when GPS signals are not available. A combination of the IMU, an internal GPS and Wescam's MX-GEO software is used to ensure accurate location targeting and tracking, as well as image focusing. Wescam also has its own image enhancement for EO day, EO night and IR images, which can improve haze penetration, feature recognition and ID. Also included is an Automated Video Tracker (AVT). Latta commented: "When you get the information from the Wecam turrent, you need to do something with it. That used to be done in the aircraft; now, it is downlinked to the ground in real time. The downlink is provided by Enterprise Control Systems (ECS) which is a UK company. You can bring down very high definition images from the camera over this link, which can be over a distance of 100 miles. The bidirectional link is revolutionary in its own right – a state of the art broadband downlink." The fourth component of the Falcon IS system is THEIA. "It is about the exploitation of the images," said Latta. "It is not just looking at pictures. What you want to be able to do is translate that into useful information – reports of what you are seeing, where you are it and what speeds you are seeing things at and so on. That is what THEIA is. That is Lockheed Martin's contribution." Theia is unusual for a system of this type in that it most observation platforms have their roots in military applications and are bespoke, rugged and expensive designs. Latta explained: "This was birthed as a non military type system. Lockheed Martin does a lot of research, some of which is just about original thinking, determining where some existing capability would work. This type of system has been around for some time, but it is so expensive. So the thought process was to use FOSS-type software with off the shelf type equipment to create a very sophisticated, intelligent system that can interface into all of this and keep the price down." FOSS – free and open source software – delivers, according to Latta, 'a lot of bangs for your bucks'. "It is the modern way of doing software integration; it is using modern languages like Java to produce the fancy stuff you see on the displays so you don't have the cumbersome military software that also costs a lot of money to purchase." THEIA is built using a combination of RDBMS (relational database management system) and NoSQL – the alternative database query technique that lends itself to 'big data'. And the data is pretty big. The continuous stream from the six Wescam sensors is the tip of the iceberg – the system is scalable to take in information from a number of aircraft or data streams from many other sources. As with the software, the hardware is COTS to keep costs down. Latta said: "THEIA is just a computer system. The one I am using at the moment uses a Dell computer. In the field, we use standard rack mounted IT systems, with load balancers, servers for specific functions that type of thing. It's all Dell or Fujitsu servers in that box – just standard IT equipment. It doesn't have to be in a rack – it could be spread across six or seven PCs all networked together – but we decided to make it deployable, so we have a rack that can be lifted and shipped to where we want it. What we did in this instance [for the Falcon IS demonstration] was to use a very high performance PC and load it into the van." The van in question was a Mercedes Sprinter fitted out with the Theia and the mobile ground support for the Falcon IS. Typically, this would be manned by one or two people: one operating and/or monitoring Theia and the sensor; the other one controlling the aircraft through the ECS link if it was in unmanned operation. The van has a generator and antennae, which can be up to 5m high and therefore offering substantial line of sight distance. "From the Lockheed Martin perspective," said Latta, "the number and types of sensors and the nature of the link are not important, as long as it provides the information. What comes through the antennae is fed through an Ethernet link to feed THEIA, which processes it. "We know the position of the plane because it [and the Wescam turret] has a GPS. So, if I know how high the plane is, exactly where it is and what it is looking at on the ground, I can start to produce some form of intelligence on this picture. That is what this system does. As long as I have a signal and can convert it from analogue to digital, I can ingest it into my intelligence processing system. THEIA can take in information from the autogyro, external camera feeds, traffic cameras, mobile deployable units, databases, connect via 3G or other networks – it makes sense of it, then produces what we call actionable information." A typical system may have three screens; one showing the location map, another showing live video feed and a third for alerts – the actionable information it produces. The important bit, according to Latta, is what Lockheed Martin terms Enterprise Services and Multi Intelligence. "It is about the big data and video analytics. The Enterprise Multi-Int is our way of tagging information, of putting data into our Big Database. That database could be video files, it could be mapping, could be reports and we will tie all of this information together and do something useful with it." Jeremy Gildersleeves is Lockheed Martin's director of business development for the Middle East. "The crux is to get a level of performance that, in the past, you would have had to pay an awful lot more," he commented. "The Falcon IS system demonstrated at the Bahrain Air Show was a partnership between DCS, Wescam, ECS and Lockheed Martin, each bringing state of the art capabilities to the system. You have near helicopter performance in an aircraft that is a fraction of the cost to buy and run, which makes it very attractive for some of the tasks you might want to use a helicopter for – observation, pollution control, border security, pipeline observation, electricity pylon inspection, coast guard and police surveillance. Anywhere where you need a rapidly deployable solution with instant intelligence from the collected information."