High Speed Drones for ISR / OODA
ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) SA (Situational Awareness) OODA (Observation, Orient, Decide, Act)
“Situational awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status after some variable has changed, such as time, or some other variable, such as a predetermined event.”
SA is applied in understanding of the environment critical to decision-makers in complex, dynamic areas from aviation, air traffic control, ship navigation, power plant operations, military command and control, and emergency services such as firefighting and policing; pipeline monitoring and remote security operations.
SA also involves both a temporal and a spatial component. Time is an important concept in SA, as SA is a dynamic construct, changing at a tempo dictated by the actions of individuals, task characteristics, and the surrounding environment.
As new inputs enter the system, the individual incorporates them into this mental representation, making changes as necessary in plans and actions in order to achieve the desired goals. SA also involves spatial knowledge about the activities and events occurring in a specific location of interest to the individual.
Thus, the concept of SA includes perception, comprehension, and projection of situational information, as well as temporal and spatial components.
Response Times
Incident response
Drones have found to be highly effective and increasingly popular shrinking time and space in ISR applications in response to detected incidents when time is of the essence to achieve, or maintain, competitive SA that is reliable and consistent, before the ‘state’ of SA changes from one significant state to the other. The diagramme below shows the integration of SA with the OODA(Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) loop.
SA OODA integration
Prompt feedback on a situation is crucial to ensure the best-informed responses and sensors housed on low altitude UAV platforms are frequently used to obtain such remote situational feedback
Average drones speeds
Currently the inherent design of most commercially available small UAV quadcopters allow speeds in the range of about 60km/hourand often have flight times of less than 30 minutes, which means they have outbound flight times of less than 15 minutes.
There are some long range drone manufacturers that produce drones that can achieve 60 minute flight times with 30 minute outbound flight times and a select few long range specialists that can muster a 60 minute out bound flight time.
Human walking speeds
The average walking speed for a person is about 5km/hour, in the wilderness it is about 4 km/hour. Which means that in the 15 minutes that it could take a drone to get the point where an alarm was triggered, persons on foot could have walked about 1 km, or 2 kms if the outbound flight was 30 minutes, 4 kms if the outbound was 60 minutes.
Sensing
Sensor Strength
The power of a sensor is determined by a combination of: Resolution – how far it can detect a human target: which is about 2 kms for HD Zoom, 700m for IR and 1 – 2 km for SAR, and vertical FOV (Field of View) which can be in the region of 450 for IR, 630 for HD Optical. As sensors are often used in combination they could be constrained by one common set of limitations.
Initial Observable Span (Sensors)
Depending on which sensor (IR, HD Optical or SAR) is being used, a field of vision area of between 1km in diameter to 2km across can be observed when arriving at the initial point of detection.
Growing Size of Search Area
Within 15 minutes of walking the search area to find human targets is 3.14km2. This increases to 12.57km2 after 30 minutes and, 50.27 km2 after 60 minutes.
If target/s have moved further than the initial observable span of the AUV-borne sensors, the ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) mission converts to a search mode with accompanying risk that it becomes more difficult to find, and to connect targets with the initial point of detection.
Sensor Observable Area As % Of Search Area At Different Points In Time.
The initial observable span of UAV based sensors reduces from 100% after 15 minutes of the target search area to 25% after 30 minutes and 6% after 60 minutes and the search challenge increases exponentially. All of this assumes the flight speed of standard drones. Clearly speed of response is critical to the effectiveness of OODA.
Benefits of High Speed Drones
Speed vs. flight time
At 60km/h, conventional UAVs cannot achieve greater efficiency if they reach long range targets belatedly.
At 200km/h high speed low altitude drones would reach a target 60km away in 15minutes, a conventional UAV would still be 45km away.
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