Concepts For Additional Revenue Creation Within The Embedded Land Vehicle Vetronics Community Eco- System

James Falasco

Product Segment Leader GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms

High Speed Computing & Graphics 5201 Regent Road, Irving, Tx. 75081, USA

972-536-8410 james.falasco@ge.com

Keywords: Embedded Simulation, FPGA, Modeling, Distributed Simulation, Computer

Generated Forces, Embedded Training, Sensors, UGV, Vetronics, Data Compression ABSTRACT: The military market worldwide is adopting new embedded vetronics technology to assist the currant war fighter in their approach to countering both traditional and asymmetrical threats. Trends are beginning to emerge that are creating a tighter coupling of various disconnected sub assemblies into a scalable embedded computing paradigm. GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms product portfolio has the breath to allow a vetronics designer mix and match flexibility to aggregate solution requirements in the vertical applications reviewed below. This aggregation of “boxes” gives the platform maker an ability to recover / improve margins; while providing the war fighter a lower cost per unit platform. As today’s war fighter moves more and more into an approach where either mounted or dismounted he will interact with his supporting vehicle infrastructure it becomes obvious that our currant net-centric world will be mapped into the military vetronics space. Using a combination of computers, lasers, navigation modules, radios, and other technologically advanced equipment to improve war fighter’s ability to communicate on the battlefield allows this to seamlessly occur. The catalyst that is evolving to synthesize the various aspects of military vetronics seems to be Situational awareness. Comprehension of observations is the essence of situational awareness. Law enforcement officers use situational awareness on a daily basis. Studies show that situational awareness has three levels of critical factors. GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms enabling technology assists the development and fielding of solution sets for each one of these critical factors The three factors are; know your route; know who inhabits your route and their tendencies and motivations; know current intelligence. Know Your Route: You get a transmission of an incident in southwest Baghdad. Your unit cranks up and gets ready to roll. You want to know the best route and best way to approach the area. You want to know what to expect along the way and what might have changed when you get there. All these issues compose the situational awareness scenario and will change constantly depending on the circumstances. It is for this reason that we must provide the war fighter with a scalable solution that can be rapidly reconfigured depending upon the scenario itself. Know who inhabits your route and their tendencies and motivations: Clearly, it is impossible for the war fighter to have an in-depth knowledge about the all the potential threats along the way It would be possible though to keep updated information on known strong points,places of population congregation , known local Leaders, etc. that could be analyzed and compared with new intelligence reports. The result would be a “fused” picture that when generated as the action plan could then be communicated and progress measured against. ; Know current intelligence: The aspect of this need can again be addressed very much from lessons learned by the law enforcement community. Be able to place on the screen vehicles that show recent bodywork, extra fuel tanks, or antennas. Total situational awareness is gained through increased comprehension of what we observe. It results in a greater ability to make short-term predictions about what is going to happen and therefore make decisions regarding our response. Comprehension is gained through education, training and experience. If you attain total situational awareness you will be better able to prevent, respond and dominate the digitized battlefield .

1. Military Land Vehicle Vetronics

Market Review The military land vetronics ecosystem consists of a number of sub categories. The purpose of this paper is to addresses the various categories and suggests opportunities for value add to those in the eco-system and to those supplying to the ecosystem. Categories reviewed are; situational awareness, networked man portable technology, VHMS, (vehicle health monitoring systems), sensor payload modeling & simulation, embedded training, additional vehicle computing modules.

Figure 1: Typical Land Vetronics Platform 2. Situational Awareness Land Vehicle Situational Awareness provides the war fighter with the capability to monitor his environment in real time all the time. Situational awareness (SA) involves awareness of what is happening around you to understand how information, events, and your own reactions will impact your goals and objectives, both now and in the future. Lacking SA or having limitied or inadequate SA has been identified as one of the primary factors of military platform occunpant fatalities. Having fully accurate and up-to-the-minute data for today’s warfighter is a major design concern. SA has been recognized as a critical, yet often elusive, foundation for successful decision-making across a broad range of deployed and planned vehicle platforms. Today’s designers are turning more and more to the comcept of emebedded situational awarness combined with the ability to leverage the same assemblies into training nodes. This thinking maximizes space on the vehicle and assists in driving down program costs. The war fighter can both fight and train on the same system.

3. Networked Man Portable Technology Today’s war fighter interacts with manned vehicle platforms through a variety of wearable technology that enables them to participate in individual and collective synthetic environment training and mission rehearsal exercises either being tethered to computer systems, trackers or infrastructure or untethered . This interactive virtual reality driven environment provides an unparalleled level of natural movement and interaction to the entire training experience. In essence you have taken the classroom out into the field and allow the warrior to train the way he will fight. Technologies that are enablers to this approach revolve around video compressuin , data acquisition , information storage and retrievel. Scalability of hardware solutions and the ability to provide computing infrastructure that can evolve as the applications and mission scenarios change and evolve are key drivers in this area. 4. VHMS (Vehicle Health Monitoring Systems) Today's military land vehicles are very complex platforms They are no longer simply iron boxes with mechanical controls that use an electrical spark to ignite the gasoline. They are now complex networks of microprocessor controlled devices that manage weapons systems and interact with a variety of other war fighting platforms. As military ground vehicle manufacturers move to become total system suppliers, they are offering more then a weapons platform of transportation. They are offering constant connectivity with technologies like GPS, display systems, integrated satellite communications & embedded situational awareness and training capability. At the lowest level, where microprocessors are integrated into the system, they now have the ability to incorporate an artificial intelligence driven technology set . Therefore those same microprocessors can begin to take a more active role in the diagnostics process. Subjective decisions can be made about whether to shut down the platform, to warn the driver, to record values for the service technician, to record environmental conditions, to synthesize information to keep the platform running. In many of these systems, the sensors will be distributed across several subsystems. Diagnostic evaluations will incorporate elements from each of the subsystems where the data will be networked throughout the platform . Enabling ground vehicles with this type of diagnostic capability will allow the war fighter to squeeze additional years of performance

out of any platform thus enabled. Another side benefit is the quicker return of units to operational status when minor issues can be addressed before they would become major serviceability issues. GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms has products in its portfolio that can be integrated to provide the war fighter with scalable vehicle diagnostic solution sets. 5. Sensor Payload Modeling & Simulation A key component to creating sensor payload modeling & simulation in embedded sensor design is integrating FPGA computing into the mix. The FPGA can be best described as a parallel device that makes it faster than software. FPGAs as programmable “ASICs” can be configured for high performance processing, excelling at continuous, high bandwidth applications. FPGAs can provide inputs from digital and analog sensors —LVDS, Camerink, RS170 — with which the designer can interactively apply filters, do processing, compression, image reconstruction and encryption time of applications. Examples of the flexibility of this approach using COTS Modules hosted by a COTS multiprocessing base platform are shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: Typical FPGA COTS Processing Model Sensors exist to detect and measure all physical states. For example: time, temperature, pressure, torque, speed, acceleration, distance, density, color, edges, shapes, counts, volume, etc. There are sensors to measure anything for which a value can be assigned to it. Collections of sensors can also detect and measure non-physical information: stress, truthfulness, and pain. These values are determined with some algorithm that synthesizes the information and allows analysis to be made. Enabling FPGA code is a big assist in this area and a example package GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms provides for designers use.

6.Embedded Training Today’s war fighter spends many hours learning how to operate the vehicle they are assigned to and engage with the various sub assemblies involved. Usually the training takes place in a classroom environment and attempts to recreate the realistic feeling of a field deployment. With increasing frequency the thinking is drifting to allowing the crew to gain training familiarity within the actual platform while deployed. The goal of Embedded Training is to allow the crewman to hone their skills in vehicle operation. They accomplish this task by engaging in simulation that requires the user to utilize the vehicle facilities as if under a normal Operational State. At the end of the training scenario, the crewman will get to review the results of the session as well as results of previous sessions to check progression An example of the type of rugged hardware needed to facilitate this task is depicted in FIG 3.

Dimensions 6.77” x 9.25” x 3.25” 172 mm x 235 mm x 82 mm Power dissipation 85 Watts (at maximum clock specifications) Input voltage - 28 VDC

Figure 3: Rugged Embedded Training Hardware 7. Additional Vehicle Computing Modules A military ground vehicle’s vetronics is composed of a variety of processing nodes. Some nodes are used for vehicle control and management while others are used allow the weapons systems to function. These nodes and applications usually represent the “fixed “ units in that they come with the system and are upgraded on a technical insertion roadmap that allows the vehicle manufacturer a chance to take advantage of reduction in size, weight, heat and cost while improving overall performance. The second category of additional vetronics computing modules is those associated with

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the mission specific aspects of the vehicle platform. Vehicle processing node examples are SIGINT,ELINT, C4ISR ,C2, UAV management and IED neutralization

8. Future Plans

As ground military vehicles vetronics evolves a short-term challenge is looming that could easily drift to the right. Military planners have issued directives mandating tactical vehicles carry enough up- armor to insure a higher survivability against IED’s and RPG rounds. The added weight dramatically reduces the weight /space budget for onboard electronics. Going forward this will cause much trade-off analysis to be done. GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms product portfolio allows the systems designer to mix and match modules to integrate the most cost effective payload processing elements possible. Visit Our Website http://www.gefanucembedded.com