WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio – In March 2018, the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Sensors Program Office, working jointly with the AFLCMC Medium Altitude Unmanned Aerial Systems Program Office, sponsored three demonstration flights of an MQ-9 Reaper with AgilePod.
The flights were a first for AgilePod on an Air Force major weapon system, and were the result of collaboration between AFLCMC and the Air Force Research Lab.
“These flights mark the culmination of more than two years of cutting-edge technology development led by our colleagues within the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate ManTech team, and Sensors Directorate Blue Guardian team,” said Lt. Col. Elwood Waddell, the advanced technologies branch chief within the Sensors Program Office.”
The AgilePod program will offer a family of non-proprietary, government-owned pods of several sizes that can accommodate various missions, quickly change payloads and fit on multiple platforms.
The program uses open adaptable architecture and standards-based design to ensure maximum flexibility without proprietary constraints.
“The AgilePod program began with a desire to bring agile manufacturing practices to the ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] enterprise, culminating in a wholly government-owned, open architecture ISR capability that was both payload and platform agnostic,” said Andrew Soine, a program manager with AFRL’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate. “The program is really taking off, with proposed ISR and non-ISR applications that we couldn’t have foreseen only a few years ago. By owning the technical baseline, we’ve shown what can be done in relatively little time and cost when faced with emergent user needs.” Read more
Source: www.afmc.af.mil