A toehold in the commercial unmanned-aircraft business is taking Lockheed Martin in interesting directions, but where this small-scale exposure to a fast-growing market might take the defense giant in the long term is hard to guess.
Spearheading its entry into the civil market is the Indago quadcopter small unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which became a Lockheed product when the company acquired developer Procerus Technologies in January 2012. But the engagement goes further, with other business areas working with farmers to speed the processing of images from UAS and providing information on unmanned-aircraft flights to general-aviation pilots.
Trials of the 5-lb. Indago already have seen Lockheed work with Australian operator Heliwest to use the quadcopter to support firefighting by flying at night when manned aircraft operations are banned for safety reasons. Heliwest also has used Indago for shark-spotting on the Western Australia coast, and in April deployed two of them to Vanuatu to help map damage after Cyclone Pam. In the U.S., Indago has been teamed with the Lockheed/Kaman K-Max unmanned helicopter in a firefighting demonstration.
POPULAR NOW
Now Lockheed has partnered with nonprofit Project Lifesaver International to equip the quadcopter with a system that enables first responders to find people with cognitive disabilities who wander from their homes and become lost. Equipping the Indago with a lightweight antenna and receiver that can locate tracking bracelets provided by Project Lifesaver should dramatically extend the search range compared with the ground-tracking equipment now used.
Project Lifesaver CEO and founder Gene Saunders says studies show that about half of all autistic children will wander off at some point, while about 60% of Alzheimer’s sufferers will become lost. The organization provides equipment and training and has enabled almost 3,000 rescues since forming in 1969. Saunders says its system has cut search times by 95% to an average of 30 min.
Mosaicking software efficiently turns raw images of a field (left, before) into a single photograph (right, after). Credit: Lockheed Martin

A wristband puts out a once-per-second FM pulse that can be detected by the direction-finding hand controller over a distance of only around 1 mi. Fitted with an antenna and receiver, the Indago can operate up to 3 mi. from the controller and, flying at 400 ft. altitude, pick up the wristband signal at ranges of 5-7 mi.
Small UAS have another growing use: gathering imagery. Lockheed has employed the aircraft to develop a more efficient algorithm to assemble thousands of pictures into a single high-resolution photo for agriculture and other purposes. Bundle adjustment, the conventional algorithm used to mosaic images, can handle tens or hundreds of pictures but can take days, says Lockheed.
UAS like Indago are cheaper to use than manned aircraft but are limited to 400 ft., and photographing a 250-acre field from that altitude generates thousands of narrow field-of-view images that must be mosaicked. They  do not match perfectly because of aircraft motion and so need to be adjusted—orthorectified—to produce a single high-resolution photograph for analysis. “Bundle adjustment does not work,” says systems engineer Mark Pitt. “There is too much information for the software.”
Bundle adjustment identifies common features, called ground control or tie points, in overlapping images. But the exact locations of those points on the ground are not known, so the algorithm estimates the three-dimensional coordinates as well as camera position and orientation, and varies those conflicting parameters through many iterations in an effort to minimize the georegistration errors.
Approached by an agricultural firm facing the problem of geomosaicking thousands of images of a farm, Lockheed developed an algorithm that makes the process more efficient by separating the problem into two parts: adjusting just the ground control points and then the camera parameters. “It converges very quickly,” says Pitt. “That surprised us, so we tried it on several data packages, and it works.” Tests have included imagery data provided by the Indago team.
These are small activities for an entity the size of Lockheed but as the civil market grows, the company is seeing burgeoning commercial interest in technologies it is developing for the military, including hand-launched UAS with fuel-cell propulsion that can be deployed quickly to remote areas and launched rapidly to stay aloft for extended periods.