A General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc (GA-ASI)-owned Avenger remotely piloted air system (RPAS) equipped with Lockheed Martin's Legion Pod has recently demonstrated its ability to track and follow targets of interest autonomously during a test flight over California.

The flight took place on July 2 but was announced by GA-ASI on August 11. This industry funded demonstration brings military aviators a step closer to being capable of utilising autonomous systems that support manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T) in joint domain operations.

During the flight, the Legion Pods infrared search and track system, IRST21, detected fast moving aircraft operating in the vicinity and fed tracking information of those aircraft to the Avenger’s autonomy engine which prioritised the targets informing the Avenger aircraft to manoeuvre for target engagement.

GA-ASI's Vice President of Special Programs Chris Pehrson said, “GA-ASI is committed to developing persistent and affordable solutions to meet the challenges of air domain awareness and defensive counter air against near-peer threats. The success of this Avenger/Legion Pod demonstration represents an important step toward more sophisticated autonomous missions for unmanned aircraft and MUM-T in a complex battlespace.”

This flight builds on GA-ASI’s autonomy flight test series. This series started in late 2020 to demonstrate next generation air-to-air unmanned aerial vehicle functionality. Integrating the Lockheed Martin Legion Pod took less than three months and was enabled through the Open Mission Systems (OMS) message standards. This OMS demonstration proves that operational systems already in existence can be integrated across platforms with minimal cost.