High-Level Functional Architecture for Sensor Management System

Unmanned systems are becoming widely utilised in dirty, dull, and dangerous missions and they are seen as key enablers in gathering data and acquire information that are then relayed back to the control station. Their utilisation is essential to increase the command centre situation awareness and provide the information superiority required not only in military, but also in civil and commercial applications. Two major issues associated with unmanned systems´ exploitability are the costs associated with sophisticated sensor platforms and the limited datalink band. This paper provides an overview of high-level sensor management system architecture that it is envisaged to provide a twofold advantage to the sensor system. Firstly, it will provide onboard data processing and intelligent data classification, which is seen as a means to significantly reduce the utilisation of the datalink. Secondly, it will allow enhancing the sensing capabilities of commercial-off-the-shelves (COTS) sensors, which would imply a significant reduction in the cost of the payloads.