Future Test & Evaluation for UAS
In September 2024, the second Uncrewed Air Systems (UAS) T3E Day (Test, Trials, Training & Evaluation) attracted more than 150 guests to MOD Boscombe Down. The event was organised to bring together stakeholders in the UAS community with delegates from across MOD, police, academia, fire services, borders, prisons and transport. During the day, guests were engaged in talks, panel discussions and a demonstration. The focus was on leveraging the current and future T3E capabilities to enhance operational understanding and reliability of UAS.
Funding for the event was secured through the Long Term Partnering Agreement (LTPA) Innovation Account. The location for the day was the Indoor UAS Test Facility at MOD Boscombe Down; this facility provides a test area for systems that are at a low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) and avoids the hurdles of using unproven systems within the UK regulatory airspace.
UAS are now a major consideration at program and national strategic level, so it is crucial to understand how and when they can be tested to ensure they will operate optimally on the frontline.
The panel discussion focussed on the importance placed upon uncrewed systems Test and Evaluation (T&E) for ensuring mature and effective capability in the future. The panel was hosted by Andy Caldwell, Head of Research, Development, Test & Evaluation and included: Commodore Tim Green, Royal Navy Operation and Advantage Centre, Blythe Crawford, Commandant of the Air & Space Warfare Centre (ASWC), James Gavin, Head of Future Capability Innovation (FCI), DE&S and Colonel Richard Ball, Commander UAS Group, Joint Aviation Command.
The panel gave their own perspective on how T&E enablers can enhance output against the highly dynamic threat environment. This can be achieved by using fully instrumented T&E capabilities to provide a much greater level of insight and help to optimise equipment, operational tactics, techniques and procedures. When embraced, effective UAS T&E will enable defence capability to evolve much more quickly.
One of the key areas under focus was how to embrace digital T&E for UAS. There are challenges in using purely digital T&E, particularly in the validation of data. The unique opportunity we have across the LTPA is the ability to blend calibrated physical environments with the scale, mass and complexity that can be delivered through digital. The combination of the synthetic environment with physical testing provides a system of systems effect, with a far greater operational impact than would result from purely physical testing, but far more reliable than pure modelling.
Matthew Titman, Implementation Manager for the event commented “The real opportunity we have across the LTPA is the blending of physical and digital Test & Evaluation, connecting facilities and networks, crewed and uncrewed, synthetic and live assets. There will be challenges that we didn’t foresee, but we will learn as we grow.” The LTPA ranges are already digitally connected such that data can be passed from one to another allowing our subject matter experts to remotely access data coming from the system under test. In the future, the vision is synthetic lab able to fuse data from multiple federated test facilities into a synthetic environment, allowing interaction with other MOD synthetic and simulated assets. This vision represents a significant technical and financial challenge, but would be a step change in benefit for test and evaluation.
Future aims
We were pleased to welcome our colleagues from the UAS Denmark International Test Center, collaboration with other European UAS test centres is key to success with the potential to demonstrate a federated digital/ physical bridged test scenario internationally. We look forward to further engagement with our European colleagues as together we learn how to test, learn, adapt and deploy safe and effective capability. The overall purpose of the UAS Test Facility is to understand how we can better incorporate UAS T&E, to enable defence capability to evolve more quickly, to bring it to frontline troops faster.