Warfighter mission scenarios have evolved, and show a greater need to cover more diverse sets of targets from a single platform, and require a number of different sensor packages. Increases in computing speed and global connectivity have expanded the rate of technological advances. This has evened the global playing field, and many have taken advantage of the situation, shrinking the significant advantage that the United States once held over its peers. Traditional acquisition processes and stove-piped proprietary weapon and sensor systems no longer suffice. Unique integrations, vendor-lock-in, and data rights issues have been shown to stifle competition, limit innovation, eliminate missionized capabilities, and drive life-cycle program costs. To maintain dominance in this environment, the DoD must create agile systems that are flexible, modular, rapidly reconfigurable, and adaptable to shifting priorities. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is responding by developing technologies for Agile Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), or simply AgileISR. The AgileISR mission is to support rapid and affordable integration of emerging capabilities, delivering advanced sensing and communications capabilities to legacy aircraft and enables higher mission readiness and adaptability to the future needs of the Air Force. A key component of AgileISR is the Open Adaptable Architecture (OA2), which enables rapid integration of sensor systems built on open architecture standards and a Government-owned physical pod interface for developing and acquiring missionized solutions.
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) - Sensors Directorate Blue Guardian program researches, develops, and demonstrates rapid sensor integration technologies. This includes integration technologies for not only the physical sensors, but also the software, communication, and processing elements. Blue Guardian’s approach is to leverage existing baseline open architectures and develop new open architecture and adaptable interface technologies. The resulting integration technology is called the Blue Guardian Open Adaptable Architecture (OA2) and enables development and demonstration of new Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities with reductions in cost, schedule, and integration time. Blue Guardian has grown from a flight test focused program to taking the lessons learned of the difficulties in sensor integration and developing OA2 software and hardware technologies to improve the efficiency and speed of sensor integration. Over the past year, Blue Guardian has teamed with the AFRL Manufacturing and Materials Directorate to integrate OA2 into the AFRL AgilePod. This paper discusses the background for these research efforts, development approach and technical details, highlights OA2, discusses recent test events, and future areas to improve OA2 to improve United States Air Force capabilities!
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