Electronic Military & Defense magazine was developed for engineers, program managers, project managers, and those involved in the design and development of electronic and electro-optic systems for military, defense, and aerospace applications.
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Tutorial Figure 4: The GE Intelligent Platforms IPS511 Rugged Situational Awareness Processor is designed to provide 360˚ situational awareness, and can be deployed as a simple, cost-effective upgrade to virtually any platform operating in a demanding environment. attractive for use in SA systems, as not only are they cheap to build, they are also cheap to replace. This is an important consideration when the sensors are under regular threat of destruction in action and many are required on each vehicle. Newer digital sensors are more expensive than analog sensors and not yet as widely available in a rugged military form factor. However, as digital sensors are now becoming more prolific in weapon system sights and driver vision systems, it is reasonable that they should be considered for SA systems as well. The logical argument put forward for the use of digital sensors over analog sensors is that, for a similar cost, fewer higher resolution digital sensors can be used in place of a larger number of analog sensors to achieve the same total number of pixels on target. This may hold true when comparing the sensors in isolation, but for SA systems, the next most important factor is the distribution of the sensor video around the vehicle to the various crew displays. It is in the supporting equipment required for the distribution and processing of the sensor video where the costs start to become noticeably different. Again, largely due to the maturity of the technology, equipment for routing, amplifying, switching, and processing analog video is currently available in proven military form factors at a relatively low cost. In the desired move to video distribution over Ethernet, the current cost of this supporting equipment is considerable, especially when the parallel push for even higher resolution sensors is considered, requiring a 10 Gb Ethernet video bus around the vehicle to route all the sensor video simultaneously. This video bus requires expensive, power-hungry Ethernet switches and fiber optic cables, as well as considerable video processing equipment, in order for the crew to visualize the video content. Although GigE Vision-compliant Ethernet video sensors have been around for some time, and are available from a number of commercial manufacturers, there are currently few military providers offering rugged, military-proven ver44 Electronic Military & Defense ■ www.vertmarkets.com/electronics sions. As DEF STAN 00-82 is not a commercial standard video format, there are even fewer manufacturers offering compliant sensors. If the sensors and supporting equipment required to support SA video over Ethernet were compared in isolation with their analog equivalents, there would currently be a sizeable cost difference. Such comparison is complicated, however, by the fact that, in these new vehicle architectures, the Ethernet bus allows video and other vehicle system data to be transmitted, and offers a pathway for video to be distributed from other vehicle sensors, such as the driving and weapon sensors. It also potentially offers easier distribution of sensor data from remote locations outside the vehicle. Figure 5: The VICTORY standard will be included in all upcoming engineering change proposals for existing vehicle fleets, as well as in the Ground Combat Vehicle effort. Conclusion Emerging vehicle video distribution standards make SA a core capability of new military fighting vehicles, with a "designed-in" Ethernet-based video distribution system that enables video content to be delivered to the entire vehicle crew. However, the increase in video bandwidth and flexibility is provided by equipment that is more expensive than other video distribution formats. This increased cost means that the use of this architecture is currently only appropriate in high-cost vehicles, such as main battle tanks, or in planned future vehicle designs like the new U.S. Ground Combat Vehicle (Figure 5). For less expensive vehicles, it may be more cost-effective to deploy SA systems that adopt an older video format such as analog video, which requires more equipment to route the video around the vehicle but overall provides a cheaper alternative to video over Ethernet. Andy Preece received his BSc Hons in computer science from the University of Greenwich (London) and his MBA from the University of Texas at Arlington. He has worked for a number of organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom, specializing in simulation and training systems. He is currently application lead for GE Intelligent Platforms' range of visualization products.