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Contract worth up to $5M awarded to WSU for UAV research

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Staff Report 3:31 PM Thursday, September 22, 2011

FAIRBORN — The Air Force has awarded Wright State University a contract worth up to $5 million over five years for research that could eventually help a single pilot to manage flights of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles simultaneously, university officials said Thursday.

The initial funding increment of $700,000 will leverage $750,000 in state funding through Ohio’s technology development-supporting Third Frontier program for facilities and laboratory equipment, Wright State officials said.

The work will support 30 research jobs and possibly 10 new jobs within 18 months, along with graduate assistants from the region, said Ryan Fendley, director of the Wright State Research Institute.

It is the third contract awarded to the university and the Human Performance Consortium, a research alliance, under a technology collaboration program of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Human Effectiveness Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In December, the university disclosed the award of two other human-performance research contracts worth up to $6.4 million.

The Wright State Research Institute, academic faculty and corporate partners including Science Applications International Corp., Aptima Inc., SelectTech Services Corp. and Applied Research Associates Inc. will team in the effort to improve human capabilities to work with sophisticated electronics systems and substantial volumes of data. The research is to support the Air Force’s goal to ultimately allow one operator to oversee flights of multiple remotely piloted aircraft, officials said.

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