Today’s technology requires two people to fly a single UV and analyze the intelligence that it gathers.

The hope for the future is to use high-tech software that allows one war fighter to operate up to five unmanned vehicles – deployed by air, land, or sea – and analyze the data.

‘‘It would enable us to do things we’ve never done before,” said retired Rear Adm. Tim Heely, who until recently headed the program executive office for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons.

Sailors and Marines could review images from the air, land and sea simultaneously, and in real time. They could make critical decisions in calmer, safer environments, Heely said.

The ‘‘dull, dirty and dangerous jobs,” he said, could be done by unmanned vehicles. As a result, pilots would spend less time hovering in an airspace for hours looking for a subject. Marines would peek around fewer dangerous corners in crowded urban squares. Sailors would venture into fewer hostile waters to determine the level of risk.

Instead, humans would focus on the jobs where they’re most needed, such as anticipating the moves of the enemy and ensuring that war fighters are as safe as possible.

If the research becomes reality, Heely said, the Navy also could save valuable resources. There would be fewer manned aircraft to buy and fewer people to train to maintain and operate them.

But testing and development aren’t the only matters that must be addressed to get this software on the battlefield. Part of implementing this research, Heely said, includes increasing the level of acceptance for unmanned vehicles. People often fear the machines could eliminate jobs that humans could fill, or that they could reduce accountability for the government.

But unmanned vehicles ultimately help the Navy work more efficiently, Heely said. They are the future.

‘‘They’re not going away,” he said. ‘‘The world is changing.”

Shaping change

Tom Moulds, an engineer heading the software development efforts here, plans to address a technology advisory board overseen by the program executive office for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons this spring.

He is seeking approval to conduct a live demonstration in September, putting the software and UVs into action at Patuxent River. The goal, Moulds said, is to learn more about the software’s strengths and weaknesses, and to determine how much one operator can really handle.

Engineers conducted a similar demonstration in November on Wallops Island on Virginia’s eastern shore. Since then, Moulds’ team has been strengthening the software’s ability to communicate with the UVs, and determining how many UVs one operator can manage.

Moulds said he’d like to garner as many supporters as possible, including the Sailors and Marines who might use the technology. The goal is to make war fighters safer, he said.

Pondering the possibilities

Protecting war fighters always sounds appealing, said Lt. Cmdr. Terry Lohnes and Aviation Technician 1st Class Sean Pettinger. The two recently returned from Iraq, where they operated Shadow UAVs with the VC-6 squadron.

They both wondered how engineers would make the new technology a reality. The battlefield in Iraq changes constantly. It’s an urban warfare where troops are trying to prevent innocent people from being harmed. Meanwhile targets move from place to place, such as people hiding or objects that have been hidden, among throngs of people and clusters of buildings.

Lohnes and Pettinger said in Iraq they used UVs for any number of tasks, such as tracking a particular car in traffic, or a person who might be carrying a bomb on a crowded street, or the happenings along a road that the troops need to access.

Lohnes’ and Pettinger said, in their experience, it takes up to four operators to launch, maneuver, monitor images and get a UV back to home base safely.

Within that group of operators, it’s critical, they said, to have one guiding the aircraft and another paying close attention to the intelligence being gathered. Images are collected using any of several possible instruments – such as cameras, radar, and infrared-imagery – called ‘‘payloads.”

If a war fighter is trying to watch more than one payload, Lohnes said he wonders whether the war fighter could miss something that could cost lives.

Another concern, Pettinger said, is that unlike humans computers aren’t savvy enough to anticipate what a person is going to do next and outsmart them.

It’s also difficult for computers to pick a particular object or person from a group of similar subjects.

For instance, if there’s a street crowded with white cars, as is often the case in Iraq, a computer can’t always pinpoint the car that needs to be followed. But a human can find something such as a dent in the trunk that would distinguish the vehicle, making it easier to track.

‘‘I don’t know if you could teach a computer to do that,” Pettinger said.

And what about software glitches, computer crashes and keeping track of ever-changing rules, such as the boundaries of no-fly zones?

Moulds had answers to every question. They’re all valid concerns, he said. His team either has the answers to avoid those situations, or solutions are in the works. That’s the purpose of this research, he said.

Today, if a computer crashes, maps are needed to re-establish the route, Moulds said. But, this research for the future would allow for a back-up system that would let Sailors pull the information from a central, Web-based server, saving time and resources, Moulds said.

And no, computers can’t anticipate the actions of a subject and outsmart him or her, the way a human being could. But, there are some things that computers do extremely well, Moulds said.

For instance, if an aircraft needs to fly inside a certain area for hours at a time to monitor a location, or collect data, ‘‘that’s pretty boring,” Moulds said. But, that’s a perfect situation for a UV to be deployed.

Meanwhile, the new software could help the human beings focus on what they do best, including anticipating subjects’ actions, like what corner he’d turn down next, and tracking the bad guys as they travel through traffic and walk busy streets. The software, he said, also could help war fighters be even more effective.

A person could be trained to keep track of five to seven things, Moulds said. This research will determine if one operator can specifically keep track of up to five unmanned vehicles. If so, Moulds said, the software must provide a reliable communication link between the operator and the unmanned vehicles.

Stephen Kracinovich, the chief engineer and assistant program executive officer for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons, explained it this way: ‘‘When you go to Best Buy and purchase a new piece of hardware that says USB compatible, you know your new phone or camera will talk with your laptop,” he said. ‘‘You can take pictures and manipulate them on your computer.”

‘‘We want to do that with our military operations,” Kracinovich said.

The goal, he said, is to equip men and women on ships and at shore with the capability to communicate with unmanned boats and air vehicles so that mission planning time is reduced, safety is increased for the troops, and valuable resources are reserved.

Step-by-step

On another day, Moulds walked through a maze of white cinderblock walls in one of the engineering buildings on base, swiped his card against a door and entered a room filled with computers. Step-by-step, he demonstrated how, at this point in his team’s research, the software system would work without actually deploying UVs.

Monitors of all sizes flashed colored images illustrating a mock run of UVs carrying out missions.

Moving dots in colors such as aqua and purple showed UVs traveling to complete their assigned tasks. Motionless gray lines indicate that a mission has been completed. Corresponding text at the bottom of the monitor describe the mission of each UV. A human technician can alter or delete the software’s plans.

‘‘Things change by the minute,” Moulds said, echoing what Sailors have said about the battlefield.

To stay informed about their surroundings, war fighters might launch smaller UVs by hand, using the same motion a child would use to fly paper airplanes. Others might be catapulted or launched, similar to aircraft with live pilots. Some could sail the seas like ships or submarines.

If for some reason the UV couldn’t complete its mission, it would send a signal back to the computer requesting reinforcement.

UVs would use satellite imagery from the air, land and water, which Moulds says is similar to imagery from Google Earth. That information would be stored in the computer and used to help UVs navigate their surroundings.

And similar to GPS in a car, Moulds said, if a UV somehow got off track, or could not proceed as planned due to weather or other restrictions, the software would automatically suggest an alternative route.

For war fighters, the job would be more like monitoring missions than plotting them out task by task, Moulds said.

The unmanned vehicles could hide out in secret locations, and wait for their assignments from a human operator behind a control panel with several monitors and a keyboard.

The software would suggest the UVs best suited to tackle any task, based on factors such as proximity, amount of fuel, its capabilities on the sea’s ever-changing waves, and how fast and high it flies.

For safety measures, the human being at the controls would have the option of revising, accepting or rejecting the computer’s suggestions, which could include anything from deploying more UVs, to sending out a live pilot to strike a target.

On every mission, man and several machines would be in constant communication.

Stakes are high, Moulds said. And, he hopes that the demonstration, using UVs, operators and the software gets approval later this year.