By Ann Roosevelt
ITT [ITT] has migrated its expertise in images and image processing to airborne platforms and a company official sees a convergence of service requirements.
“Everyone is looking for similar types of capability. Everyone’s got the same issues: There’s broad data. There’s not enough bandwidth and there’s always someone who needs something in a time critical way,” said Danny Rajan, director, Geospatial Information Solutions, part of ITT Defense & Information Solutions. “Within the enterprise we’re really trying to make sure our solutions can meet those critical needs.”
ITT’s primary customer is Program Manager Unmanned Aerial Systems (PM UAS). ITT focuses on medium to high altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) above 15,000-18,000 feet.
The software products are fully interoperable and standards based so ITT’s suite of Full Motion Video (FMV) products supports pretty much every video format that’s being generated by in service UAS.
“What we’ve focused on is a software package that can be bought, just like any other software package [and] can be integrated into any standard hardware set-up and be placed either on a platform or placed in the ground shelter,” Rajan said.
The work focuses on the standard compliance, ensuring the data stream can be opened by any asset with any tool the Army decides to use. That allows the company to participate in a number of different activities.
Right now, ITT is focused on two areas: the Army’s UAS strategy, working very closely with PM UAS on the airborne and ground side. Today, it’s a focus on FMV, but also using the company heritage with still imagery. Wide area surveillance data is a part of this, and the ability to work with motion imagery, very large persistent type views, and integrating that technology into the Army’s airborne and ground architectures.
The second major focus area is the Air Force Gorgon Stare sensor package program. “What we’ve implemented on the Air Force side is a standards based, interoperable implementation of image compression, image dissemination and the visualization piece,” Rajan said.
“We believe the Army can benefit significantly from that…Those lessons learned are now enabling us to build a sensing product that we can build a lot faster, a bit cheaper, and also in terms of performance closely aligned to what the Army wants,” he said.
This convergence of using existing technology, staying commercial off the shelf and interoperable is going to benefit the company and the customer over time, he said.
ITT is also working on the broad area surveillance piece the Navy is examining. Again, there is a convergence.
“They [the Navy] pretty much want the same things the Air Force and Army want, which is UAV asset that can–in the Navy’s case launch off a carrier deck–have that ability to either do a wide area search, or persistent viewing or identify some very high detail in a specific area that’s seen,” he said. “I think the Navy is going to be in a position to benefit from what’s happening with Gorgon Stare and what PM UAS is doing within its programs.”
To deploy its software and integrated products across the enterprise, Rajan uses the popular “cloud” buzzword. Ten years ago the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency or Air Force had to construct large physical buildings to house data centers. Today’s cloud consists of decentralized data, residing wherever the data from, say, the Reaper or Shadow UAVs go to ground.
“What I’m going to do is allow anyone access to that data by anyone who has authority to get to it,” Rajan said.
The ITT FMV product basically operates as service on an enterprise. If someone needs FMV of a specific location on the Earth over the last 30 days, it can reside on any number of servers.
“What we do in the back end with our solution is look through the enterprise for the user,” Rajan said. Ten years ago, a user would have to know exactly where to go in a physical building to get that data. That impacted timeliness. Warfighters are busy and they want their data and exactly when they ask for it.
“We’re trying to do some of that manual work through some of our applications,” he said.
The other buzzword is service oriented architecture. “What we’re selling to our customers are basically applications that can be dropped in and again, we’re doing the same thing on the airborne side we think we can operate in that same way, so any user who needs a specific application whether it’s a search for data, whether it’s to process information or to disseminate a compressed version–whatever that request is, we can make that happen anywhere in the enterprise,” he said. “We see the UAV that has the processing system as a part of the cloud. It’s just another node. With full interoperability, you’re making it easy for anyone to get to whatever data they need and from the customer side, it’s much more flexible and robust.”
The idea is connect the product, turn it on and it works, rather than having to go through a contract funded to build something.
“We think that all the services are going in that direction, where the infrastructure is enabling companies like us to be able to drop in solutions and systems that we’ve already built and saving a lot of risk, a lot of (non-recurring engineering) NRE and hopefully being able to bring solutions to the table on a much more accelerated timeline,” Rajan said.