Micro data centers for military drones
Pushing the bounds of size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP)
to design the most rugged and sophisticated on-board sensor and data
processing for military unmanned air, land, and sea vehicles
BY John Keller
Demand is exploding for sensor capability aboard unmanned
vehicles. To a large extent, these
unmanned craft represent the eyes
and ears of U.S. and allied military
forces, and are becoming more so
in the future. Top commanders rely
on unmanned vehicles to get them
the information they need, when
they need it, with little or no time
lag involved.
Unmanned vehicles also are
shrinking in size. Where once the
U.S. military relied exclusively
on unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) the size of jet fighters,
today’s UAVs often have wing
spans no longer than a person
is tall and can be launched by
catapult, and sometimes even by
hand. This trend is continuing
with development of UAVs small
enough to fit in a warfighter’s
shirt pocket.
This creates unprecedented
design challenges for the embedded computing industry, whose
engineers increasingly are being
asked to design what essentially are
rugged, mobile micro data centers
that are small, rugged, powerful,
and power-efficient enough for duty
aboard the latest generations of
unmanned vehicles.
“We are seeing an uptick in C4ISR
[command, control, communications,
computers, intelligence, surveillance,
and reconnaissance] applications on
unmanned vehicles, with video, electro-optical, and sensor fusion all tied
together,” says Doug Patterson, vice
president of business development
and marketing at embedded computing specialist Aitech Defense Systems
Inc. in Chatsworth, Calif.
When it comes to unmanned
vehicles, the driving mantra of
onboard sensor processing for
unmanned vehicles is SWaP-C,
which is short for size, weight,
power consumption, and cost. This
pressing need is what keeps embedded systems designers up at night.
These systems should be small,
lightweight, power-efficient, and
cost-effective.
Processing unmanned data
It all begins with on-board data
processors, which must handle
massive amounts of data coming in from still-image and video
cameras, radar, signals intelligence
(SIGINT), electronic warfare (EW),
electro-optical sensors, and other
kinds of surveillance and reconnaissance equipment.
“More processing is required on
board unmanned vehicles,” says
Chris Ciufo, chief technology officer
at General Micro Systems (GMS) in
Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. “PowerPC
was the way we did things 10 years
ago. Now we have these data-min-ing applications on UAVS where you
are collecting reams of data from
these sensors of large-pixel density, from TV and infrared cameras. There’s just lots and lots of
The A176 rugged
embedded
computer from
Aitech Defense
Systems has
general-purpose
graphics processing
unit (GPGPU)
functionality to
provide real-time image
recognition for
unmanned vehicle
surveillance.
