An experimental U.S. Army UH-60M helicopter with fly-by-wire flight controls is now set to get a ‘robotic brain’ that will allow it to operate with a high degree of autonomy with or without any humans on board. This is the latest development in a series of tests stretching back years now that has been steadily working on ever-greater pilot-optional capabilities for the Black Hawk family, which could also find their way onto other aircraft.
Sikorsky, now a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, announced the plan to add its MATRIX autonomy system onto the fly-by-wire UH-60M, also known as the MX, earlier today. The integration is being done under a $6 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in cooperation with the Army. Sikorsky first began developing MATRIX in 2013 and then further evolved the system as part of DARPA’s Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program starting in 2014. The ALIAS/MATRIX autonomy package has already been demonstrated on a Sikorsky fly-by-wire pilot-optional UH-60A testbed, as well as an S-76 helicopter and a fixed-wing Cessna C-208 Caravan.
“As part of ALIAS in 2020, Sikorsky provided the hardware and engineering support to add fly-by-wire flight controls to the [UH-60M] MX aircraft,” according to a press release Lockheed Martin put out today. “When combined with the MATRIX autonomy system, the MX aircraft will be a near-exact copy of Sikorsky’s UH-60A fly-by-wire Optionally Piloted Black Hawk helicopter, the company’s flying lab that has tested MATRIX autonomy over hundreds of flight hours.”
“The [ALIAS/MATRIX equipped MX] aircraft will enable DEVCOM to explore and mature the practical applications and potential concept of operations of a scalable autonomy system,” the release adds. “Evaluation will include assessment of different sensor suites to perceive and avoid threats, obstacles and terrain, and develop standards and system specifications interfaced with the MATRIX system and a fly-by-wire flight control system.”
The integration of ALIAS/MATRIX onto the MX Black Hawk is set to be completed next year.
“We’re going to have a tablet. You push a button, and it’ll go through all the pre-flight checks, it’ll start, it’ll take off, and perform that [assigned] mission,” Dan Tenney, Vice President, Strategy and Business Development for Lockheed Martin for Rotary and Mission Systems, also said today in explaining the current capabilities of the ALIAS/MATRIX system. “And we’re not talking about remote control. We’re not talking about programmed waypoints. We’re actually talking about putting a mission into the aircraft and allowing it to perform. “
“Now the autonomy comes in of truly saying this is the mission we want you to perform,” he continued. “And then when the aircraft goes through algorithms and says, this is the best way to perform that mission, and adjusts.”
Tenney was talking to Defense News‘ Sebastian Sprenger in a live interview from the floor of the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual convention in Washington, D.C., which opened today, which The War Zone and other attendees listened in on.
This high degree of autonomy “becomes extremely important as you can think about supplementing a pilot. You know, if you have a pilot flying and there’s other mission objectives they need to be working on, they can autonomously fly the aircraft [using ALIAS/MATRIX] – not just an autopilot, but actually tell it to do the mission,” Tenney added. “It’ll adjust because of weather, it’ll adjust because of geography or threats that are out there that are being detected through sensors and space capabilities. And so you can also then send in other signals and how to go perform a different mission.”
When it comes to the Black Hawk family specifically, the addition of digital fly-by-wire control systems is key to this next step in pilot-optional capabilities. “So when we’re fly-by-wire and we take out many of the mechanical linkages, we can then have crewed-uncrewed [capabilities], we can add autonomy into those systems, but you don’t have to change the entire structure [of the aircraft],” Tenny explained.
Sikorsky plans to conduct a new demonstration of ALIAS/MATRIX’s capabilities as part of AUSA utilizing the existing UH-60A test helicopter, which will fly from the company’s facility in Stratford, Connecticut under remote direction from the show floor.
As The War Zone has highlighted in our reporting on ALIAS/MATRIX in the past, the capabilities the system offers open up valuable new avenues for the Army, as well as others, for operating existing helicopters like the Black Hawk series, while also limiting risks to pilots and other aircrew.
“So let’s say you have a Black Hawk flying in theater, and you have troops on the ground that need an emergency MEDEVAC [medical evacuation], or an event like that. They could send a message to the Black Hawk, and the Black Hawk could reroute [automatically],” Lockheed Martin’s Tenney offered as an example for the floor of AUSA. “Now they’d have to have the right parameters to do that, okay, but they would send it. The Black Hawk would accept that mission, turn around, find the best place to land, and perform it.”
Previous ALIAS/MATRIX testing has focused heavily on highly autonomous medical evacuation and resupply missions, including one instance in which the existing UH-60A testbed delivered real and simulated blood to a forward location. New ways to get key supplies to forward forces and otherwise operate critical logistics chains in contested environments are areas of significant interest to the Army, as well as the rest of the U.S. military, as part of planning now for future high-end fights, especially one across the broad expanses of the Pacific against China.
The ability to rapidly switch between crewed and uncrewed operations would also give commanders more flexibility for conducting operations in both higher and lower-risk environments. Being able to position and reposition UH-60s from one location to another without the need for human flight crews could be just as valuable from a resource management perspective as having the option to send one into a more dangerous locale without risking real human personnel. Acting as an artificial intelligence-driven co-pilot, ALIAS/MATRIX could also just help provide extra margins of flight safety during crewed operations.
“Autonomy-enabled aircraft will reduce pilot workload, dramatically improve flight safety, and give battle commanders the flexibility to perform complex missions in contested and congested battlespace, day or night in all weather conditions,” Rich Benton, Sikorsky Vice President and General Manager, said in a statement today. “Soldiers will rely on Black Hawk helicopters into the 2070s, and modernizing the aircraft today will pay dividends for decades across Army Aviation’s current and future aircraft.”
The Army is also pursuing next-generation aviation capabilities, including the tilt-rotor Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) that is set to supplant a significant portion of the service’s UH-60s, which could also benefit from the ALIAS/MATRIX developments. As already mentioned, the autonomy package has been tested on other helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft already.
What comes out of continued work on ALIAS/MATRIX could be of interest outside of the Army, as well. Contested logistics chains, in particular, are a major area of concern facing the entire U.S. military. Other branches are also actively looking at uncrewed aerial and other capabilities as ways to ensure forces, especially ones dispersed to far-flung locations to help reduce their vulnerability, can be adequately resupplied in the future. China, the United States’ principal global competitor, is facing the prospect of future military operations with the same kinds of logistical demands and has been notably pushing ahead in its own development of uncrewed aerial cargo aircraft.
It is important to note that questions have been and continue to be raised about the true extent of developments in the autonomy arena, especially when it comes to uncrewed aircraft. U.S. military and industry officials have repeatedly stressed that work in this regard is progressing along incremental approaches and that building operator trust in autonomous capabilities remains central to these developments.
“The first time that you give not a not good answer, a really bad answer to a user, they will never trust that system, that box, or potentially use a deliverer [company supplying the system], ever again,” Dr. Alex Miller, Chief Technology Officer for the Chief of Staff of the Army, said during a virtual roundtable discussion on artificial intelligence and related technologies that the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) think tank hosted back in September. “And it’s not because you’re bad at your job, or the system’s bad, it’s because they don’t want to spend more time being paranoid, double-checking the answers, because of one bad experience.”
All of this points to the importance of the continued testing of ALIAS/MATRIX, which is now set to involve the MX Black Hawk, as the Army, DARPA, and Sikosrky move further ahead in pushing toward real operational autonomous capabilities for the UH-60 family and potentially other aircraft.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com