WAVE LABORATORY

Wright State University's Aerospace and Virtual Environments Laboratory

Uninhabited Combat Aerial Vehicles in the Military SEAD Mission

The SEAD mission is the supression of enemy air defenses.Uninhabited Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) are remotely operated aircrafts used by the military in the SEAD mission.

The objective of SEAD is to destroy, neutralize, or temporarily degrade enemy air defenses in a specific area by physical attack or electrical warfare. The goal of the lethal suppression is to prevent systems from radiating, either through physical damage or by intimidation. The mission requires detection, location, identification, and destruction of important elements of enemy air defenses.

The Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) mission involves the active stimulation of the enemy radar patrols. This entails fighter pilots flying into enemy territory in the hope that enemy ground patrols turn on their local radar tracking devices to pinpoint the fighter pilots exact locations for destruction. When the enemy turns on their radar the fighter pilots are able to pinpoint the enemy radar locations on the ground. At this point it is only a matter of who can fire first and who can avoid the oncoming missiles. The fighter pilots have the advantage of high speeds and 3 dimensional movement, whereas the radar patrols are nearly immobile.

Figure: UCAV Interface for SEAD Mission

Obviously the SEAD mission is a very dangerous mission for the fighter pilots and it is a goal of the military to take the pilot out of the combat vehicle. Uninhabited combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) will make significant contributions to the warfighting capability of operational forces. Timeliness of battlefield information is greatly improved while reducing the risk of capture or loss of manned assets. When compared to manned aircraft, UCAVs are cost effective and versatile systems. In the SEAD mission reconnaissance, intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and target destruction are the premier mission of the UCAVs. The recent push for incorporating Uninhabited Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) in the SEAD mission has brought up many questions concerning the command and control system. To be sure that the interface for controlling the UCAVs is developed such that mission performance is optimized many basic questions must first be answered. Is one controller enough to monitor and control the assigned number of UCAVs? How many UCAVs can one controller operate at different levels of workload? Does automation improve overall mission performance? What is the optimal number of controllers and how should they interact?

This research is critical to the optimal design of up and coming control stations for remotely controller vehicles.

Publications related to the UCAVs

Wesler, M. Mc., Lucas, J. R., Gallimore, J. J. and Marshak, W.P. (1999). Managing Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Information Employing a Reduced Area/Depth Separated Display. In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 43rd Annual Meeting (pp.91-95). Santa Monica, California: Human Factors Society

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