What British Army's new overwatch logistics drone brings to battlefield

So we've run an experiment during Exercise Iron Titan to see whether we could better protect dispersed logistics sites through augmenting those troops with novel technologies to increase their mass and enable them to organically better protect the dispersed logistics equipment and locations. And to do that we've brought together three different technologies which we've discovered through the Army Warfighting Experiment process. The first of which is the Evolved Dynamics Sky Mantis which is the remotely piloted air system you can see before me. So it's a British system, it's well known to Defence and it's a very mature ARPAS product. The particularly novel part that we've been experimenting with is the tether which is just down here. So this enables the aircraft to stay in the air for up to 48 hours at a time powered throughout through that tether. The interesting point is that that tether can be dropped mid-flight and the ARPAS can then go off to fly to investigate another location and get eyes on using its high quality optics. That technology has been joined up with this one over here which is another British company Archangel Imaging and their remote ground sensor called the Argonaut. And this is an AI augmented edge processing sensor. So what we're trying to do is remove a soldier from being on a sentry position watching a piece of equipment because this can do it for them. So it's got a really advanced AI running inside the box that's going to detect a person, a weapon system, a vehicle in an area where we don't expect there to be any of those people. These technologies are being tied together by the Banshee tactical network which these phones are connected to and they're running a piece of software which gives us situational awareness and allows us to receive data feeds from different technologies. So in this case the quick reaction force commander will receive an alert in their chat that says a person has been detected at camera two. So they can go to camera two, select it and they'll see the image clip or short video feeds that's been sent from the camera alerting them to the presence of someone or something. If they decide at that point it requires more investigation they can via this tool task the drone commander to drop the tether, go away to the camera two position and investigate with a higher quality optic. Concurrent to that a quick reaction force can be being talked onto the target area, they can be being briefed on the task in hand and so we're vastly increasing the efficiency of that process through augmentation with these technologies. During the experiment we found that responding to a threat approximately a kilometre away was taking in the region of 15 minutes. With this we had eyes on within two minutes and because of the concurrency of actions we were able to achieve it was a far more effective way of working. Thanks for watching. For more from Forces News like and subscribe to our channel.