Airbus demos first-ever autonomous teaming mission at European air show with Primoco UAVs

[00:00:12]Wouldn't it be cool if I just could ask my drone, "Hey, fly around the airport and find all follow me cars." And it would just do the job on its own.

[00:00:21]Or even better, if I would have several drones, I would ask them, "Hey, do the job all together."

[00:00:27]Future?

[00:00:28]No, that's not future. That's today.

[00:00:31]Here at Berlin Air Show, we will demonstrate exactly that.

[00:00:35]>> The pilots of Primoco will do the takeoff and as soon the aircraft number one and aircraft number two are in the loitering pattern, the Airbus Mission System MARS will take over and will do the autonomous mission tasking.

[00:00:51]And then we will see that the two aircraft will collaborate together in order to provide a mission. We have included in this aircraft a brain, which we call MARS autonomy, and a mission control station which is connected to this brain. We will give later on the aircraft a tasking. There's a follow me car at the airport or at the surrounding of the airport, find it, and do identification on it. We have included our MARS autonomous system into it, which is basically computer with AI-driven software, but also a traditional autonomy software.

[00:01:29]Yesterday, drones were flown like cars, but much harder.

[00:01:34]The pilot had to steer the aircraft, the camera, had to manage the data link, had look at the screen and to find objects.

[00:01:42]So, it was quite a hard job. Today, autonomy is helping a lot in order to deload the pilot or the operator. As soon we have the takeover of the two aircraft into the system, this will be the handover from the traditional way to manage it to autonomy. Now you see the mission control station interface, which is the interface of the operator to the aircraft themselves. The green boxes are the boxes where we will have the missions and you see the operator with a touchscreen tasking the drones. For the first mission we are going to demonstrate and he is currently allocating the aircraft to this job and you see the first drone already starting to execute autonomously its task. The task he has given was find in this mission area the follow me car and as soon you have it, give the position to the other aircraft which is in the launching position as well or still and as soon the target is found the second aircraft will go there and would will do the visual identification.

[00:02:55]And you see now the electro-optical signal of the first UAV and uh the follow me car. You see the red box red signal which is included here in in the scenario viewer and already the second drone started to go there to do the visual identification. And here we have it. You see the follow me car and the second aircraft is doing the visual identification of the aircraft itself. So it goes into a gear lock and it shows the car or the van very clear which is basically the end and um of the mission itself. We can stop and this is currently happening. The operator stops the mission and says uh go go into the holding pattern and as soon the aircraft are there again, we will have a second mission.

[00:04:02]The second mission will be different. We would like to have the result of of the search much faster. So, we will let them collaborate and to do the job of finding the target together.

[00:04:16]And this is exactly exactly what the operator is currently doing on this uh mission control station. He is giving the tasking to the drones in order exactly to do that. The mission area is split up in two subparts allocated to the two UAVs. And of course, you can imagine that this is then much faster in terms of finding a target.

[00:04:40]And you can also easily imagine that in such a case, if you have not only two drones, but uh five, 10, or 20, you could do the same job with one operator much, much faster. And this is exactly what is a benefit of what we are doing here.

[00:04:57]We have a system which can be operated by one operator with many drones and doing the job compared to what have done uh many operators in the past. But tomorrow, and this is what we are seeing here, the pilot will just task high level what he wants the system to do, and the system itself thinks and works together. And and the computer and the the brain is shared between the several drones themselves. They're acting more or less like a football team. They know the rules.

[00:05:31]They know the task.

[00:05:32]And everything else is done by themselves. This will, of course, increase the level of speed in terms of every job to be done a lot, and um it will reduce the human resources you need in order to do so also a lot.

[00:05:49]Now we are landing again and this finalizes our demonstration today which I think is the first time we have seen an autonomous drones flies in an air show live and in color. So thanks a lot for listening and watching this demonstration.

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