Common Operating Picture for UAS Operators

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) will have a number of capabilities on display during the Dubai Airshow, which opens this morning, including its System for Tasking And Real-time Exploitation (STARE) system. STARE provides a common operating picture for operators of GA-ASI UAS, by integrating and displaying the wide range of surveillance information gathered by its platforms.

“STARE brings together data from a variety of external multi-domain data feeds, as well as tactical data from [ISR] aircraft,” commented Darren Moe, Senior Director of Automation, Autonomy, and Artificial Intelligence (A3I) for GA-ASI. “With UAS platforms, such as our MQ-9B, STARE is emerging as the ideal platform to decipher and disseminate the information for decision-makers.“

A new part of STARE is the OPTIX platform from General Atomics’ Commonwealth Computer Research, Inc. (CCRi), a company acquired by GA earlier this year. OPTIX enables STARE users to visualise real-time and historical data from numerous sources on its moving map display and enables ‘big data’ processing and analytics that take high volumes of information and turn it into usable knowledge. OPTIX combines, correlates, and streamlines multiple sources of intelligence data so the user can observe both strategic and tactical data sources and track information.

Anomalous behaviour alerts are generated using AI to look automatically for activities or behaviour of interest, such as vessel-to-vessel transfers at sea, failure to broadcast AIS, and economic exclusion zone violations. When these are detected, alerts are generated on the map, with the essential goal being to reduce the number of people required to monitor and decipher the various feeds.