Washington: For most of the firms that participated in a late June drone trial staged by the Defence Innovation Unit in remote Alaska, it was the first time their systems had flown outside of a lab setting.
The five companies brought drones and radio prototypes to a range near the US Army’s Fort Wainright to see how they’d fare against simulated electronic warfare systems looking to jam their navigation and command-and-control capabilities. DIU was assessing whether any of them were ready to transition to the military services for further development or fielding.
With a few exceptions, the lack of field testing showed. While several companies made progress by the end of the four-day test event, they struggled initially to maintain targets and navigate flight routes. Some of that was due to jamming and some of it was because their technology wasn’t as mature as expected.
That outcome is not unusual for a prototype demonstration, DIU officials said told during the event. In fact, the government team in Alaska wanted to see how the companies responded when the systems failed and whether they could iterate and come back the next day with a better solution.
That process is vital for both the DOD and the companies, but most small, commercial firms don’t have access to test space where they can learn and refine their products under the types of conditions they might face in the field. That’s a problem for the Defence Department, whose leaders want to field technology — and drones in particular — from a broader pool of companies and at faster rates.
DIU’s Trent Emeneker, who leads several autonomy projects for the organisation and helped facilitate the Alaska testing, said in order to field systems that meet the needs of troops on the ground, DOD needs to change the way it tests in two key ways — by providing more opportunities for small tech companies to wring out their systems, and staging those tests in the field with military operators.
“If we want to succeed, we have to embed engineers with warfighters, and we have to be out in the field testing,” he said. “We have to do it all the time.”
