// Image: Drone Evolution

Since the mass commercialisation of small UAVs or drones, their defence and security benefits have become increasingly prevalent, both in an offensive and defensive capability.

For a mobile squad on the ground, their situational awareness capabilities help provide a better understanding of the battlespace; however, when it comes to an armoured column, fixed position or reconnaissance task, simple issues such as battery life can cause serious limitations.

This is where tethered UAVs come in. Able to fly in a fixed position for an indefinite period of time, a tethered system allows for constant surveillance over an area and can be attached to a reconnaissance vehicle to get more altitude than a traditional mast.

A key emerging player in this market is Wales-based Drone Evolution, which has worked with the UK’s Ministry of Defence and others in the development and deployment of its tethered drone solution.

Drone Evolution business development director Toby Townrow says the company’s core tethered drones offer a number of advantages for militaries when compared to their traditional counterparts, most notably when it comes to reconnaissance.

While traditional man-portable UAVs have become increasingly useful for forward reconnaissance, battery life can limit the effectiveness of such systems, as the drone constantly has to be brought down to replace the battery, providing gaps in the operational picture. Tethered UAVs are not constrained by battery life; their maximum altitude is only limited by the length of the cable.

Outside of the military use case, this capability was illustrated when a tethered UAV stayed airborne for eight hours in one day in order to provide CNN footage of a Democratic presidential debate.

In the hands of the military, such a capability could be a game-changer for reconnaissance, providing a constant aerial view of an area without any interruptions for recharging. This concept could also be applied for the defence of static positions, where a tethered UAV could be placed at each corner of a base to provide a constant stream of the surrounding area, helping to guard against attacks.

Drone Evolution’s Skywire comes in two variants, allowing for the tethered drone to be powered either directly from a vehicle or from a mains supply. Both systems are built into a 50mm ammunition tin for enhanced portability.

These ground stations are then wired into a tether reel which connects to the drone via a battery adapter, allowing for flight hours that are only limited by the size of your power source, not the drone’s standard battery pack. The reel has an auto-tensioned reel-in/reel-out system designed to make cable management simple. The drone’s altitude, how long it can stay in the air and the payload it can carry are only determined by the type of drone that is chosen for integration with the system.

Townrow adds that the tether can also provide a fibre optic connection allowing for totally secure communications between the drone and its operator.

A key functionality, Townrow tells us, is the ability to place the SkyWire ground station, tether and drone on the back of the vehicle and allow it to draw power directly from the vehicle’s power outlet. Townrow explains that using the system with a military vehicle can be as simple as plugging the ground station into the 24V power outlet, connecting the tether to the drone and then flying the drone as normal.

“The system can be integrated with a number of power sources, from personnel carrying a battery to a generator in a base.”

At an exercise at Catterick, the company showed the British Army how to use a tethered UAV. “There were about four or five other companies doing various other communications equipment stuff because they had to get the screwdrivers out and start spending hours actually updating the vehicle, putting the systems in the vehicle,” Townrow says. “All we had to do was run along and plug it in.”

During this exercise, the company used a car battery to power the ground station and UAV. However, the system can be integrated with a number of power sources, from personnel carrying a battery to a generator in a base. This also adds the flexibility of being able to unmount the system if need be, allowing it to be used in an area the vehicle can’t reach, but a squad of personnel could.

As well as being used with traditional military vehicles, a tethered drone could also be integrated with autonomous vehicles and unmanned ground systems (UGVs). This would allow a smaller, unmanned vehicle to move ahead of a formation and undertake sustained reconnaissance missions working together with the tethered drone.

“You can send them forward to positions and then the idea is that you can then send the drone up after that remotely, and it's tethered so it stays up in the air for a couple of hours, or six hours,” Townrow explains.

“Integrating a tethered UAV system into an infantry squad or formation could also reduce piloting requirements.”

Drone Evolution is currently working to increase airborne time to 72 hours, which would help to expand the system’s potential in reconnaissance and surveillance roles. This extended flight time would allow for its use in a temporary monitoring capacity around a fixed position, for example providing uninterrupted situational awareness for the time a formation is camped in a location.

Integrating a tethered UAV system into an infantry squad or formation could also reduce piloting requirements compared to wireless UAVs. Townrow explains that operating a UAV, for example in the British Army’s Light Dragoons, requires training a soldier as a pilot and having that extra person on the vehicle to fly the drone. A tethered system doesn’t require a pilot to keep it airborne after it is put into position, freeing up personnel to focus on their primary mission.

The dynamic global and geopolitical nature of the A&D industry demands that manufacturers be on their toes to shift business priorities, capitalise on new technology opportunities and react immediately to major market events or regulatory changes. These can be relatively opportunistic and planned, such as moving toward servitisation to unlock aftermarket revenue or implementing new technology like IoT and artificial intelligence to revolutionise factory operations. But they can also come from an external source at a moment’s notice.

Witness the market pressures from the Covid-19 crisis, which is decimating supply and demand, and spawning regulatory mandates such as the US Government invoking the Defense Production Act. There are already some outstanding agile trend-setters in A&D manufacturing. CAE, for example, shifted its focus from manufacturing flight simulation systems to developing an easy-to-build ventilator in less than eleven days to help mass-produce healthcare equipment in Canada.

But all too often, companies find opportunities hampered by their legacy software systems that have become a business progress bottleneck, or a software supplier who wants them to follow a particular development route. In a recent Accenture survey of CIOs undertaken in the UK, 53% said that their current enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was inflexible and that they wanted to extend it using intelligent technology.

This statistic is indeed an indictment of some ERP systems. With this in mind, here are four key ERP ‘stress tests’ A&D manufacturers should keep top of mind when transforming their business operations.

Enterprise software just cannot be all things to all people. The baseline ERP functionality delivered by large incumbent providers – who develop a single platform to appeal to as many industries as possible – may well be good for operations such as finance, HR and payroll. But running aerospace and defence manufacturing operations is not the same as managing the day-to-day processes of a retail business. 

Far too regularly, A&D manufacturers set out on an implementation strategy and find that costly, complex and confusing customisations must be made to their software infrastructure to accommodate critical A&D manufacturing processes such as precision part engineering and intensive quality control. A&D manufacturers need to be confident their underlying systems infrastructure supports the specific business needs of their industry now and into the future – not have to dance to the tune of their software supplier.

“A&D manufacturers need to have full control over how they decide to deploy supporting enterprise software.”

This even applies to deployment model for enterprise software. Many ERP vendors are pushing their customers to the cloud as a prerequisite which, again, may seem like a sensible choice for industries with less heightened security requirements. But A&D manufacturers are involved in a sensitive supply chain, where they must prove compliance with strict military security requirements. When researching the challenges of cloud adoption in aerospace and defence organisations, Tech-Clarity found that two thirds of A&D companies highlighted security as a ‘significant risk’. When looking specifically at OEM respondents, that figure rises to almost three-quarters.

A&D manufacturers need to have full control over how they decide to deploy supporting enterprise software. Where business processes dictate, this could be a physically secure on-premise installation, a full SaaS-based deployment or a hybrid environment spanning both.

A&D manufacturers are behind some of their peers on the Industry 4.0 or smart manufacturing curve. During a recent webinar, which zeroed in on the impact of Industry 4.0 for A&D manufacturers, IFS asked 140 A&D decision-makers to respond to a number of polling questions to gauge views on Industry 4.0 adoption. Only 20% of participants were actively looking to leverage 4.0 technology, identifying it as an enterprise-wide priority. The majority, 68%, were still researching how these technology advances can help achieve their digital transformation goals.

Small wonder. If you look under the hood of many ERP suites, you will find multiple software products are comprised of disparate applications, developed separately and lashed together with a common user interface. No software can exchange data with every sensor, and those A&D manufacturing organisations with inflexible deployments will need to customise and add to their existing implementation in order to gather information from every available sensor.

“To a certain extent, A&D manufacturers and services companies today are becoming software companies themselves.”

Smart factories and intelligent assets deployed in the field will generate many terabytes of data. Simply extracting this data – let alone mining it to truly inform business decisions and better take advantage of aftermarket service revenue – is something A&D manufacturing is still trying to master.

This can be avoided though, by deploying industry-specific manufacturing ERP software built on API-driven architecture. To a certain extent, A&D manufacturers and services companies today are becoming software companies themselves. They may have developers who write software to do things such as introduce data from the IoT and enable other systems to interact with enterprise software. RESTful APIs, which is a software architectural style for designing networked applications, make it that much easier for them to link valuable data steams into the core ERP system.

Once data is introduced into a supporting enterprise solution half the battle is won, but to ensure victory the next stage means analysing that information to gain insights into operational and business performance. A&D manufacturers are moving data analytics from a tool for observation to a tool for optimisation, from proactive to predictive intelligence and to help meet the demands of rapid industry changes.

By actively monitoring the performance of assets and processes, A&D manufacturers can make faster and better-informed decisions, which would ultimately lead to productivity improvements, cost savings and added maintenance predictions. But this is moot if data exists in a heavily customised and fragmented enterprise software implementation. Siloed sources cannot be harnessed to paint a full 360-degree view of manufacturing operations and back-end business processes.

Intelligent enterprise software should bring together solutions that visualise information to support decision-making at both strategic and tactical levels, providing insight and context when and where it is needed. This includes integration with other programmes vital to A&D manufacturing, such as manufacturing execution systems, which drive execution of shop-floor operations, and customer relationship management systems to record customer-specific information.

By combining enterprise architecture, business activity monitoring, intelligent business process management, business intelligence and reporting capabilities, a unified platform is created that allows for an end-to-end picture to be built in line with the organisation’s business objectives.

Being an A&D manufacturer means meeting more stringent security needs than any other industry sector. This security sophistication applies not only to the physical products A&D manufacturers deliver, but also their digital presence. Witness the security mandates required by defence operators, such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and the newly released US DoD Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) version 1.0.

The US Government explains that “the CMMC is intended to serve as a verification mechanism to ensure appropriate levels of cybersecurity practices and processes are in place to ensure basic cyber hygiene as well as protect controlled unclassified information that resides on the department’s industry partners’ networks”. Failing to adhere means A&D manufacturers are shut out of valuable military and bid situations.

“It will become more and more important to ensure any ERP solution used for A&D manufacturing has functionality specifically designed for export control and cybersecurity regulations.”

Enterprise software plays a key role in meeting digital security requirements – and it’s here where one-size-fits-all ERP systems do not contain the industry-specificity to keep A&D manufacturers compliant. Without a fully integrated application suite allowing data to flow seamlessly between different functions such as supply chain management, manufacturing, engineering and CRM, it is difficult to know which products, parts or transactions may put an A&D manufacturer in jeopardy.

It will become more and more important to ensure any ERP solution used for A&D manufacturing has functionality specifically designed for export control and cybersecurity regulations. A business dealing in regulated materials or involved in sensitive military contracts must be able to quickly and efficiently marshal this information from within their ERP system and combine it with external regulatory data to ensure compliance as they process orders, share information and conduct other transactions. They also must be able to share it with overseas partner companies in a frictionless environment.

We’re rowing in unchartered global waters in 2020, where opportunities for new business, the challenge of embracing new technologies and the sudden emergence of disruptive market forces are all happening at the same time. Success today will depend on an A&D manufacturing organisation’s ability to be agile in their operations and flex their business models – those who can’t adapt just won’t make the cut.

Ultimately, your choice of underlying enterprise software platform matters. It can either be your strategic enabler of change, or the Achilles heel.