Unmanned aircraft systems: challenges and opportunities

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have been widely recognised as efficient platforms to perform surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The promising roles played by UAS in peace time missions coupled with their lower operating cost motivate the military world to evolve doctrines and concept of operations with UAS as the main elements in the future integrated network centric digital battlefield environment. This imposes several additional mission requirements for these UAS like high altitude long endurance surveillance, armed reconnaissance, automatic short/vertical take-off and landing, operating in civilian air space, miniaturized UAS, cooperative flight and higher autonomy eventually leading to unmanned combat aerial vehicles. This paper discusses the wide varieties of future roles expected from UAS, associated technological challenges and opportunities for aeronautical systems designers and the need for a national level programme to improve the technology readiness level of critical technologies.