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The U.S. Air Force has picked Textron Systems to develop autonomous ground sensors to provide data on mobile enemy vehicles and other targets.

The Wilmington, Mass., unit of Textron Inc. was chosen to develop the Advanced Remote Ground Unattended Sensor (ARGUS) system for the Air Force and the Advanced Air-Delivered Sensor (AADS) system for the Marine Corps, according to Capt. Winston Campbell, who manages the program at the Air Force's Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom AFB, Mass.

"These are deployable sensors delivered by high performance aircraft into hostile, denied areas, deep areas, much farther than you would use any helicopter or artillery," Campbell said in a July 22 telephone interview.

"Once put out in the area of interest," he said, "they just sit there and listen for targets passing by within their range." Using acoustic signatures, the sensors "attempt to identify the target vehicles based on what's resident on their target library."

Textron was picked over two other competitors, which Campbell declined to identify. The company will do the work under a $19.2 million contract awarded July 7 by ESC.

The contract covers system development and demonstration, which should wind up in mid-fiscal year 2006. Low-rate initial production, and then full production, would follow. Deployment could begin at the end of FY '06.

"That's for ARGUS," Campbell said. "The AADS program actually will be a little bit faster. They may be ahead of us by as much as 12 months. They have an existing communications architecture on the back-end already."

AADS is an option in the Textron contract.

"We recently got the documentation to support the Marine Corps exercising that option," Campbell said. "We'll be pressing forward with that."

As for the number of systems to be bought, he said, "Our estimates right now range from 400 to 600 or so, just for ARGUS. It really is just based on how much production dollars we have." The Future Years Defense Program includes about $105 million for the program.

The lineage of ARGUS and AADS, Campbell said, can be traced to the Igloo White sensor program of the Vietnam War, but, "quite honestly [they were] not going to happen until Sept. 11 occurred." He said Defense Emergency Relief funds were earmarked for the programs "and some very related efforts," and things started moving quickly. The war in Afghanistan "kept the operational requirement in the front of everyone's thoughts."

The big difference between Igloo White and ARGUS/AADS was that Igloo White sensors merely sent information back to a command post, where it had to be interpreted, Campbell said. The new sensors process the information first.

ARGUS and AADS will work with systems like AMSTE, Affordable Moving Surface Target Exploitation, but precisely how is not yet clear.

"There are a lot of tools, such as AMSTE, that are used in the back end" of ARGUS, Campbell said. "That is something we're going to be focusing on in the second spiral. There are still decisions to be made as to what's the best tool to use for the ARGUS operator interface."

Other unattended ground sensors are being developed, but ARGUS is distinguished by its ability to be deployed deep in hostile territory.

Reprinted with permission from Aerospace Daily.