UAVs in a team: Airbus controls Primoco drones autonomously with Teaming Intelligence

Airbus, together with Czech manufacturer Primoco UAV, recently demonstrated how a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be controlled autonomously and dynamically in real time. Airbus’s Teaming Intelligence software was used during the flight test campaign at Písek-Krašovice airfield in the Czech Republic. It lets ground operators or pilots of manned aircraft command several of them at once – easing tasks such as surveillance and inspection over wide areas.

Two UAVs, one AI-supported teaming software

In the first scenario, the operators at the Airbus ground station dispatched two Primoco One 150 UAVs to a predefined target area. Airbus’s Teaming Intelligence software assigned each of the two aircraft its own surveillance area. Thanks to Airbus’s automatic target recognition (ATR) software, based on artificial intelligence (AI), both aircraft could detect threats simultaneously.

One of the two One 150 then located a threat and sent the geodata of the hostile air defence system to the ground station together with an alert.

For the second scenario, the two unmanned aircraft were given different tasks. While one drone monitored the target area and was to detect threats using ATR, the other waited on standby in the background. Once the first drone had detected a hostile threat, it used the teaming software to task the second with identifying it – an enemy air defence system – and reporting it to the operators at the ground station. Meanwhile, the first drone kept monitoring the area for suspected threats.

During the demonstration, Airbus and Primoco also successfully tested the integration of applications from providers other than Airbus’s in-house ATR.

Next steps at Airbus

Following the successful demonstration at Písek-Krašovice, Airbus is tackling the next steps: the Teaming Intelligence software is to become a product that can be installed on all fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft available on the market, whether manned or unmanned. The same applies to the integration of software components from external providers, such as automatic target recognition. Teaming Intelligence will thus also be usable beyond combat operations, for example to inspect critical infrastructure.

In earlier flight test campaigns, Airbus had already shown how several manned and unmanned platforms interact on a large scale – known as manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T). In October of last year, Airbus and European partners also demonstrated how helicopters and unmanned systems from different manufacturers can work together.