Sensors

RAFAEL’s INDOOR autonomous surveillance capability is taking this capability to a new level, by enabling a group of unmanned systems to map and inspect indoor spaces, enabling warfighters to explore structures suspected to be occupied by the adversary, without exposing humans to the dangerous house clearing and Close Quarters Battle (CQB).

In a trend to improve wide-area persistent surveillance (WAPS) beyond existing capabilities, three defense industries from Israel unveil groundbreaking, lightweight WAPS systems designed for small, tactical unmanned aerial systems (STUAS) at the Singapore Airshow. These platforms are designed to operate with tactical forces and provide intelligence support to the units in direct contact with the enemy.

The Raytheon Company announced it has been selected to provide the US Army with its next-generation, 360-degree capable radar – known as the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor (LTAMDS). Deployment of sensors like LTAMDS is expected to close the vulnerability of sectorial air defenses that was clearly demonstrated in the failure of Saudi Arabian air defenses to detect and warn of the Iranian cruise missile attack.

The UK Ministry of Defence has chosen Leonardo/Thales protection system to protect the RAF Shadow ISTAR fleet. This single-source selection by the MOD follows the recent SALT III international trials hosted by the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration in Sweden. There, the integrated Miysis/Elix-IR system, using a jamming waveform developed by the UK MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, proved its ability to defeat Infra-Red missiles in live-fire exercises.

IAI introduced today the 'POPSTAR', a persistent surveillance sensor using an EOIR camera array to automatically detect and track small, flying or moving targets in the air and on the ground, track those targets and designate the targets deemed suspicious and dangerous for engagement by countermeasures and weapons.

RADA unveils at DSEI 2019 two new radars addressing the acute threats that land forces are facing in the modern battlefield. Both radars - the aCHR and xMHR, provide the central sensor element in mobile active protection capabilities - both APS and mobile SHORAD, are based on the company’s modular software-defined radar platform.

DARPA calls for proposals to study tools to enable soldiers to operate and control swarms of up to 250 collaborating bots. Such swarms will be able to support soldiers fighting in an urban area, providing critical situational awareness, understanding, and decision making.

The Australian Army is now the biggest user of Nano UAS in the world. It is also the first in the world to proliferate this technology to the conventional forces down to combat platoon level

Meprolight is unveiling a new, multi-spectral EO weapon sight that combines an uncooled thermal channel with a sensitive, high-resolution digital day/night camera to provide the user effective situational awareness under all visibility conditions, including total darkness encountered in operations underground.

This post continues our discussion on Future Drones Mission autonomy evolved parallel to the automation of piloting functions. Such capabilities are derived from mission payloads that become smarter to collect, process and fuse data with other sensor streams and store it on the platform. Persistent Wide Area Surveillance (PWAS) is an example of those capabilities that help military and security...

Elbit Systems unveiled today an advanced capability that has been operational for several years with the military forces of several nations, in homeland security and the war on terror. Using a single payload integrating multiple cameras that together provides an image built from billion pixels, SkEye enables users to simultaneously look, and zoom in or out into 10 Regions of Interest (ROI), using different viewing angles. At any time they can ‘look back in time’ to analyze how a situation unfolds.

The Israel Navy has recently equipped the first Saar 4.5 (Hetz Class) missile boat with a new, multi-mission, digital phased array radar system developed and produced in Israel by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) Elta Systems.

Aware of the growing threat of bomb-laden mini drones that recently emerged in Iraq and Syria, the US Army is rushing to field countermeasures and kinetic effects designed specifically to defeat drones. DRS and Moog are cooperating with RADA to demonstrate such 'hard kill' system for testing in October.

Military robotics expert Roboteam is developing a hybrid air/ground drone robot system called ROOSTER, that mimics the flying of a male chicken. Its capability to fly over a short distance enables the Rooster to get around obstacles and reach vantage positions, like moving from a street to a rooftop in a short time.