Advanced simulation is helping Collins Aerospace rapidly develop the mission system for air launched effects (ALE), the capability that U.S. Army Aviation is counting on to enhance the reach and survivability of crewed aircraft in future conflicts.
Collins announced in July last year its selection as the mission system solutions provider for the next phase of the Army’s ALE – Small program. By October, it was trialing its RapidEdge mission system with commercial Anaconda drones at the uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) test range in Pendleton, Oregon. Collins shared details of the trial in conjunction with the Army Aviation Mission Solutions Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, last month.
“The really interesting part about this, and where the digital engineering piece of this comes in, is we went from kickoff of this event to live flight in just under three months,” said Dustin Engelhardt, Collins’ senior manager of business development for ALE. “What digital engineering allows us to do is pull a lot of those things that used to be at the end of a program . . . all the way to the left so that we can run [testing] concurrently with development of the software.”
ALE are attritable drones that will be launched from helicopters and large UAS. The Army envisions them serving as aerial scouts for platforms like the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), detecting segments of an enemy’s integrated air defense system that pose a threat to these larger crewed aircraft and relaying what they find back to flight crews. They may also carry weapons for use against enemy targets.
As previously reported by Vertical, ALE won’t require labor-intensive remote piloting; instead, they will execute their missions largely autonomously in response to high-level commands. The software for that autonomy is a big piece of Collins’ mission system, in addition to radios for communication and solutions for handling multiple levels of classified data. Other companies are developing the ALE and their payloads, with the first integrated flight demonstrations expected later this year.
Collins’ trial in Oregon, dubbed Project Medusa, applied RapidEdge to a live, virtual, and constructive simulation that used two actual Anaconda drones along with two others in a digital twin environment to fly the entirety of an ALE mission. Project Medusa took place over the course of a few weeks, including about a week of ground testing and 15 to 20 flight operations. In addition to real-time evolutions, Collins used faster than real time simulation during the event to quickly run through thousands of simulated missions, validating the performance and safety of software tweaks based on operator feedback.
According to Engelhardt, getting early feedback from “soldiers and those people that are going to go fight and employ these systems” is critical. “It can seem one way to us in the developmental stage of things, but when you actually put it in the dirt and go stress it, those people with their own ingenuity and backgrounds, they’re going to put it in situations and ask for things that we never thought of,” he said.
“So the ability for us to have them go through a demonstration event, see what it is, have our team make the changes to those autonomous behaviors right there, and then come out later that day, the next morning, and go run that new scenario live flight — it’s just a great way to go out and take the voice of the customer, voice of the soldier, and rapidly spiral that into a new capability.”
Peter Laird, Collins’ ALE autonomy solutions program manager, emphasized that this use of simulation is not only about accelerating development time for the mission system, but ensuring that the end product will be aligned with customer needs.
“The problem we’re trying to help solve is not just speed of solutions, although that’s a key part of it, but making sure you get the right solution at the end of it as well,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is collapse that time and make sure that at the very beginning when you capture the requirements, when you capture the intent, you can actually start seeing the feedback immediately.”
