By Ann Roosevelt
Raytheon [RTN] yesterday announced the launch of the Eagle-300, a wide area long-range sensor providing a persistent 360-degree view of a specific area, officials said.
“Persistent surveillance is an ever more important need in the uncertain environment that we live in today,” Gene Blackwell, Raytheon vice president of the Rapid Initiatives Group (RIG), a Raytheon Network Centric Systems team, said at a briefing and demonstration. The RIG is a type of SWAT team that is “designed to deliver critical capability to those who need them in war and peace and critical situations.”
SkyWatch LLC brought the concept to Raytheon’s Rapid Initiatives Group (RIG), which with Raytheon Vision Systems brought the idea through integration, test and demonstration in eight months.
From discussions in April 2007, the first concept version was ready in August, then image intensifiers were updated and integrated and in October the system was demonstrated. In November Eagle-300 was integrated into the open architecture of the Network Operation Center in Raytheon’s Arlington, Va., offices, said Lucy Thoms-Harrington, director, Combat Systems Netted Sensors, based in Goleta, Calif. Today, the system is being manufactured and market ready.
The Eagle-300 feed was integrated with Raytheon’s network operations center in the building, and could also be ported to a wireless handheld device, Tom Stalzer, program engineer, Raytheon Command and Control Integrated Systems, said.
Blackwell said now Eagle-300 is “a long range, 360 degree persistent surveillance sensor that is …always on, and can be produced in anywhere from a 90 degree quadrant to a 360 degree quadrant.”
Unlike many sensors that provide a narrow “soda straw” view, the Eagle-300 has a wide field of view, 360-degrees that is constantly on.
Demonstrated out to 10 kilometers to date, Eagle-300 is four feet long and capsule-shaped, weighing less than 100 pounds.
It can cost a customer from around $200,000 to $1 million or more depending on the configuration, Gary Reese, director and senior counselor of Sky Innovations. SkyWatch is its wholly owned subsidiary.
The sensor has a wide field of view (WFOV) that is always monitoring and rapidly updating, and then an independent narrow field of view (NFOV) used to zoom in once something in the WFOV is identified for further investigation, Blackwell said.
The sensor consists of commercial off-the-shelf products and can be used as a stand-alone, or as a node on a network. Sensor data can be fed to its own ground station consisting of PCs and software, or piped into an operations center.
The operator sees the sensor coverage on a map, in this case from Google (GOOG), icons pop up when something is detected, which could be human movement or other activity as designated. Clicking on the icon produces more information and then upon an operator’s decision, coordinates can be sent to an entity–soldiers or police, for example–for action. Additionally, the PC screen can show “snippets” of video of the detected activity. These snippets can be stored for later forensic analysis.
Live demonstrations showed a 360 degree panorama from a single Eagle-300 sensing downtown Washington, D.C., mounted on top of the Rosslyn Towers in Arlington, Va. The WFOV tracked human activity some 3 kilometers away at the Washington Monument and zeroed in on a truck crossing a Potomac River bridge.
A second demonstration saw Eagle-300’s WFOV detect and track a boat coming upriver, which was then checked out with the NFOV cameras.
Steve Botts, technical director of Raytheon Vision Systems, said, “The live panorama is constructed from acquired frames of data that are each in themselves acquired at about a one second update rate.”
In the upper half of the Eagle-300 is a NFOV camera with a high performance zoom capability. The bottom half houses the WFOV camera system. The sensor has four ports, each looks out over 90 degrees and it’s continually observing. “We step through eight frames to cover that 90-degrees, takes about a second,” Botts said. “So the refresh time of the entire panorama is about eight seconds.”
Eagle-300 upgrade options include low-light camera for both the NFOV and WFOV, which could extend the time of operational use. Additionally, infrared cameras could be incorporated.
The Eagle-300 sensor can aid the military, used either on a tower on the ground or from an air ship for example. The sensor alone, or integrated into a system of sensors, could be used in border surveillance, protect critical infrastructure or assets–something also of interest to other nations. The system is commercially exported, Botts said.
Already, Eagle-300 has been shown to the Army and is subject to further discussion, Blackwell said.