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Northrop Grumman Corporation and Martin UAV (a Shield AI company) have completed successful flight testing of a V-BAT unmanned aircraft system (UAS) with new features including GPS-denied navigation and target designation capabilities.

The enhanced V-BAT’s flexible vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capability is based on a platform deployed to address the U.S. Army’s Future Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System (FTUAS) mission. For FTUAS, the U.S. Army is seeking a rapidly deployable, GPS-denied navigation-capable, expeditionary VTOL system capable of persistent aerial reconnaissance for U.S. Army brigade combat teams, special forces, and Ranger battalions.

The offering is based on Martin’s UAV V-BAT UAS. According to Northrop Grumman, it is compact, lightweight, simple to operate, and can be set up, launched and recovered by a two-soldier team in confined environments. The V-BAT also is designed with sufficient payload capacity to carry a range of interchangeable payloads, including electro-optical/infra-red (EO/IR), synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and electronic warfare (EW) payloads, depending on mission-specific requirements. Additionally, Shield AI’s recent acquisition of Martin UAV will enable rapid development of GPS-denied and autonomy capabilities for V-BAT through the future porting of Shield AI’s autonomy stack, Hivemind onto V-BAT.

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc., a provider of national security solutions, has announced that its Air Wolf Tactical Drone System has completed a 100 percent successful flight at the recently approved Burns Flat, Oklahoma Range Facility. The Kratos Air Wolf Mission, which was the inaugural flight at the Burns Flat Range location, included multiple new payloads carried by the Air Wolf UAV, including a proprietary Kratos artificial intelligence/autonomy system, which has been developed by Kratos specifically for high performance, jet UAV aircraft.

Air Wolf is one of several drones in Kratos’ family of jet drones that are flying today, also including the attritable UTAP-22 Mako, XQ-58A Valkyrie, and, in conjunction with the company’s partner Dynetics, the reusable X-61A Gremlins drone. According to the company, the newly approved Burns Flat Test Range and Facility is an important new strategic asset available to it, enabling the company to accelerate its drone testing and demonstration, further increasing its ability to rapidly develop and demonstrate jet drones, supporting subsystems, and other tactical systems and aircraft.

Kratos develops and fields technology, platforms, and systems for United States national security-related customers, allies, and commercial enterprises. The company specializes in unmanned systems, satellite communications, cyber security/warfare, microwave electronics, missile defense, hypersonic systems, training, combat systems and next generation turbo jet and turbo fan engine development.

Orbit Logic’s SpyMeSat mobile app (available via the Apple App Store and Google Play) now includes an augmented reality (AR) interface for better awareness of overflying imaging satellites. The AR view overlays the orbit and position of satellites that can image your location, providing a better understanding of satellite viewing geometry and potential obstructions. For example, it makes it possible to know if an image taken by that satellite of your position would be obscured by a tree or a building. The AR interface also displays relevant information about the satellite and its capabilities, including the timing and dynamic geometry of the pass as well as the resolution achievable by satellite sensors.

In addition to real-time imaging satellite awareness, SpyMeSat provides on-demand access to recent archive satellite imagery and the ability to request new tasking directly from a mobile device. Multi-phenomenology data (optical, infrared, synthetic aperture radar, and more) is available through an in-app process of preview, select, payment, and delivery that can be completed in seconds, providing archived satellite imagery for any location on demand. When archive imagery is insufficient and new data is required, users can review available satellites, better understand the data collection environment through the AR interface, and purchase tasking based on cost, responsiveness, and capability.

While the standard SpyMeSat enables marketplace interactions between the public and commercial satellite imagery providers, Orbit Logic also develops custom mobile applications for better situational awareness and easier data-access/tasking supporting specific missions. The new AR interface will enhance these users’ mission effectiveness by facilitating better understanding of how data collection might be impacted by surrounding terrain or other spatial factors. Examples of bespoke SpyMeSat deployments include government versions for government assets and versions for awareness of satellite communications opportunities for contact scheduling, data transfer, and command uplink.

Orbit Logic specializes in mission planning and scheduling solutions for aerospace and geospatial intelligence. Its COTS products create better plans faster with fewer resources for all mission phases. Orbit Logic services are available to configure, customize, and integrate its mobile, web-based, desktop, and flight software applications to provide turn-key operational solutions that leverage the latest available technologies to meet customer goals and exceed their expectations.

EagleView, a geospatial technology provider of software, aerial imagery and analytics, and Skyline Software Systems, a provider of 3D Earth visualization software, have partnered to enable customers to visualize their geospatial data in new ways. Through this new partnership, EagleView’s high-resolution ortho and oblique imagery can be converted into 3D Mesh layers with Skyline’s PhotoMesh and viewed, edited, and analyzed on Skyline’s TerraExplorer platform.

EagleView customers will be able to utilize Skyline’s TerraExplorer web-based GIS viewer and editor to see, analyze, and share their imagery in an immersive environment. Accurately measuring distance, area, and volume is now easier than ever, which is critical for planning and zoning to verify regulations or estimate the costs of flattening a site. With floodplain analysis, disaster management can identify flood risks before they happen, and with viewshed calculations E911 can pre-plan for high-profile events. Other key analytic features for customers will include the ability to analyze shade, view contour and slope maps, and view in underground mode. Beginning immediately, the additional 3D Mesh capability is now available as an add-on to any new Reveal Essentials+ Property or Neighborhood image capture.

Skyline offers a comprehensive platform of applications, tools, and services that enable the creation and dissemination of interactive, photo-realistic 3D environments. Its products are production proven in both the defense and commercial markets.

EagleView develops geospatial technology, providing software, imagery, and analytics. The company has the largest geospatial data and imagery library in history, covering 94 percent of the U.S. population. Its technology with more than 300 patents creates highly differentiated software, imagery, and analytics products for a diverse customer base.

The General Services Administration (GSA) has selected Hexagon US Federal as a prime contractor for ASTRO, a 10-year, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract with an estimated $90 billion value. The ASTRO contract is being administered by the Federal Systems Integration and Management Center (FEDSIM). Sponsored by the Department of Defense (DoD), ASTRO is comprised of ten pools to deliver services related to manned, unmanned, and optionally manned platforms and robotics.

Hexagon was selected as one of multiple awardees for the Data Operations Pool, which includes all data collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination activities associated with manned, unmanned, and optionally manned platforms and/or robotics supporting mission performance. The formal government kick-off is anticipated to take place in November 2021.

Hexagon is a provider of digital reality solutions, combining sensor, software, and autonomous technologies, putting data to work to boost efficiency, productivity, quality, and safety across industrial, manufacturing, infrastructure, public sector, and mobility applications.

Hexagon US Federal provides technology and professional services for C5ISR, installation security, GIS, and cyber security. Dedicated to the delivery of Hexagon technology and services to the U.S. government, including defense, intelligence, and civilian organizations, the company builds solutions that help its customers design, build, maintain, manage, operate, and protect.

Kongsberg Geospatial has released TerraLens 9.3, the latest version of its real-time software development toolkit for geospatial visualization. In this release of TerraLens, the product development team has focused on improving performance for 3D visualization for large viewports and on multi-domain visualization features for joint all-domain command and control applications. Leveraging the power of modern GPUs and multi-core processors, the latest release of TerraLens is significantly faster, with new presentations focused on enhancing situational awareness.

With increased multithreading in its map handling, TerraLens can load and display vector, raster, and elevation formats smoothly without pre-processing. This is ideal for applications that have disk size constraints or for customers that have a short turn-around time between receiving map data updates and needing to use them. For applications with stringent start-up constraints or map formats that are not optimized for quick runtime access, the pre-processing option still exists, to help ensure minimal time for an initial map display.

The rendering of maps and dynamic presentations has also been optimized with increased threading in the graphics kernel, and the minimization of costly graphics state changes with batched rendering calls. Improved data culling ensures that only visible items will be rendered. These improvements are especially noticeable when displaying large numbers of dynamic tracks and objects, and frequently projected information.

This release of TerraLens also includes a slate of new tools and features, including support for OGC 3D Tiles, which can be used to create a high-resolution 3D view that is especially suited to cityscapes, while a new API to control the resolution of the terrain mesh allows applications to balance runtime performance with higher resolution terrain over which to drape map imagery. Elevation warnings can now be displayed using color ramps on both terrain and OGC 3D Tiles, as well as on primitive lines and area fills.

TerraLens continues to evolve to meet the latest map and symbology standards. Support has been added for the latest military symbology, providing MIL-STD-2525D and App-6B symbol sets. The SDK also features new mapping updates including enhanced support to discover WMS and WMTS map layers as well as monitoring the status of web requests. Support has been added for DAFIF 8.1 and S-57 Inland ENC levels. Developers will be able to track when maps have completed loading in the TerraLens viewport. TerraLens 9.3 also continues to support the latest development environment needs, including Visual Studio 2019, CLI .Net Core, and Linux RedHat8.

TerraLens has been fielded in some of the most demanding applications in the world including AEGIS, Global Hawk, THAAD, NATO AWACS, and the Joint Battle Command-Platform.

Based in Ottawa, Canada, Kongsberg Geospatial creates precision real-time software for air traffic control and UxS and situational awareness. The company’s products are primarily deployed in solutions for air-traffic control, command and control, and air defense. During nearly three decades of providing dependable performance under extreme conditions, Kongsberg Geospatial has become the leading geospatial technology provider for mission-critical applications where lives are on the line. Kongsberg Geospatial is a subsidiary of Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace.

Cepton, a provider of automotive lidar solutions, will showcase its automotive-grade, long-range Vista-X90 lidar device at two upcoming tradeshows in Europe: IAA Mobility 2021 in Munich, Germany (September 7-12) and AutoSens in Brussels, Belgium (September 15t-16).

Vista-X90 combines high performance, auto-grade reliability and low cost to meet the critical requirements for mass-market automotive applications. During both events, Cepton representatives will be available to talk about Cepton’s lidar offering for a range of smart mobility applications, including advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles (AV) and smart infrastructure.

With a compact and embeddable design, Vista-X90 is optimized for ease of vehicle integration, offering multiple placement options, such as in the headlamp, in the fascia, behind the windshield, or on the roof. Featuring Cepton’s next-generation ASIC technology, the Vista-X90 supports AUTOSAR and over-the-air (OTA) functionality, with advanced capabilities for functional safety, cybersecurity, and extrinsic calibration.

Visitors to the Cepton booth at IAA and AutoSens will also be able to learn about Cepton’s award-winning lidar solutions portfolio that extends beyond automotive and supports smart infrastructure applications such as smart roads and rail, electronic tolling, and more.

Cepton provides intelligent, lidar-based solutions for a range of markets such as automotive (ADAS/AV), smart cities, smart spaces, and smart industrial applications. Cepton’s patented MMT-based lidar technology enables reliable, scalable and cost-effective solutions that deliver long-range, high-resolution 3D perception for smart applications.

Founded in 2016 and led by industry veterans with more than two decades of collective experience across a wide range of advanced lidar and imaging technologies, Cepton is focused on the mass market commercialization of high performance, high quality lidar solutions. Cepton is headquartered in San Jose, California, USA, with a presence in North America, Germany, Japan, India, and China, to serve a fast-growing global customer base.

SPH Engineering and AirData UAV have partnered to offer pilots a way to track and manage their fleets by automatically synchronizing flight data from SPH Engineering’s UgCS to AirData.

SPH Engineering and AirData have worked closely to provide an automatic method to synchronize flight logs with AirData. The new integration will transmit detailed and comprehensive flight information from UgCS and will leverage AirData’s crash prevention algorithms, pilot and equipment alerting, as well as maintenance tracking with no manual steps required.

UgCS by SPH Engineering is a tool for enhanced UAV mission planning and flight control software solution. Today, it is used in more than 150 countries in a wide range of areas including environmental, archeological, engineering and mining, agricultural and biological. The UgCS Educational program aims to support universities with a safe and efficient tool to test innovative ideas involving surveying and inspecting with a drone. SPH Engineering is a multiproduct drone software company and UAV integration services provider.

AirData is an online drone fleet data management and real-time flight streaming platform, serving more than 200,000 users with 19 million flights uploaded to date, processing an average of 20,000 flights a day, with high-resolution data stored per each flight. It is used by large fleet operators around the world not only as a logbook, but also as a comprehensive flight safety data analysis and crash prevention platform, with advanced maintenance, pilot tracking and live streaming.

Three decades after it first entered popular culture during the Gulf War, even a cursory review of articles about GPS aimed at a mass audience still will reveal a plethora of inaccuracies and misunderstandings, ranging from the trivial to the fundamental. Among my pet peeves, some for 20 years, are statements to the effect that GPS:

1. is a tracking technology

2. is the only such system

3. is responsible for routing errors

4. can operate indoors

5. receivers “talk” to the satellites

6. relies on triangulation

7. has 24 satellites in orbit 

(For those of you picking up this magazine who are new to satellite navigation, the correct versions of those statements are below.)

Additionally, GPS is taken for granted, with hardly any recognition for the engineers, technicians, U.S. Air Force service members and others who make the miracle happen, and for the fact that U.S. taxpayers foot the nearly $2 billion annual bill for the system, which is offered free to users worldwide. (All GPS program funding comes from general U.S. tax revenues. The bulk of the program is budgeted through the U.S. Department of Defense, which has primary responsibility for developing, acquiring, operating, sustaining and modernizing GPS. The U.S. Department of Transportation is responsible for funding the extra costs associated with new, civilian GPS upgrades beyond the second and third civil signals, and agencies with unique GPS requirements are responsible for funding them.)

While not as deadly as those about vaccines or as consequential as those about elections, misstatements about GPS lead to public confusion about threats to privacy and threats to the system. To help secure GPS, it behooves those of us who understand it the most to help educate the rest about it and correct misstatements, misunderstandings and misperceptions.

Matteo Luccio | Editor-in-Chief
mluccio@northcoastmedia.net

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1. Tracking a person, vehicle or other object requires pairing a GPS receiver with a transmitter, typically a cellular phone.
2. It is one of four complete global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), the other three being the Russian GLONASS, the European Galileo and the Chinese BeiDou-3. There are also two regional systems, one Indian and one Japanese.
3. Routing errors are caused by bad map data or bad routing algorithms.
4. It requires a clear view of at least four satellites, unimpeded by terrain, buildings, roofs or even dense tree canopies.
5. GPS receivers are just that and have neither the need nor the ability to transmit messages back to the satellites.
6. Triangulation determines position by measuring angles. By contrast, GNSS determine position by measuring distances (between receivers and satellites), which is called trilateration.
7. The are currently 30 operational GPS satellites and the number varies as some satellites are temporarily removed from service, older ones are decommissioned, and new ones are placed in orbit. Find the current status of the constellation here.

TRX Systems was awarded funding through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program (PSIAP) to test, validate and harden the TRX NEON Personnel Tracker solution to support wide-scale public safety deployment. TRX is partnering with the Arlington County Fire Department (ACFD) to conduct extended testing during which the TRX 3D location technology will be used by all personnel at Station 5, serving Pentagon City and Crystal City, to validate usability and performance and to better align the solution with first responder needs.

Through a previous NIST PSIAP award, TRX improved the accuracy and capabilities of its NEON Personnel Tracker solution. With this subsequent Technical and Business Assistance (TABA) award, TRX will take the next steps toward wide-scale deployment by validating and tuning the NEON solution in a challenging live environment. Combined, these projects aim to accelerate the availability of improved 3D location accuracy, easy to use 3D map data tools, and actionable 3D visualizations for first responder use cases.

Over the course of this program, TRX will partner with ACFD to conduct an 8-month field trial that exercises the TRX NEON Personnel Tracker solution 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in a fully operational environment. The key objectives of this extended deployment are to identify and close any gaps that could inhibit widescale deployment, validate usability and tracking accuracy, and demonstrate the operational feasibility and value of the solution.

First responders typically operate in environments that are indoors, underground, or in other areas where reliable access to GPS signals is impeded. TRX’s NEON Personnel Tracker system delivers reliable and real-time 3D location in these GPS-denied environments by using patented mapping and tracking algorithms that fuse inertial sensor data to compute the user’s path and position. This solution lets on-scene and remote commanders track the real-time location of personnel during an incident, helping them to ensure the safety of their teams and improve the efficiency of their response.