In a departure from a legacy of more than 20 years of providing highly-stabilized electro-optical systems for airborne platforms, L-3 Communications [LLL] Wescam is entering the market for ground vehicle applications, launching its new–MX RSTA–here at the Association of the United States Army annual conference, company officials said.
“We spent a fair amount of time testing the water with customers, coming up with design applications for the ground market,” said Paul Jennison, vice president for
Government Sales and Business Development at L-3 Wescam.
Over the past 15 months, the company has worked to overcome the environment extremes on the ground and come up with a ruggedized system that is highly stabilized and has high definition imagery, he said.
The ground vehicle application would be for a commander’s independent viewer, where he could slew his turret independent of the gun turret or, as a surrogate gunner’s sight, Jennison said.
Right now, the Wescam electro-optical systems of the MX product line are flying in Afghanistan, and on platforms such as the Navy P-3 and P-8 maritime patrol aircraft and rotary wing aircraft.
“The first development models are available and on show, Jennison said. “It is our intention to finish product development and have units ready for customers in the middle of next year.”
Moving to the ground market was a pragmatic decision, he said. In the airborne market, there can be three to six competitors. Typically, the market itself has gotten to a point where required growth was not going to be achieved by remaining solely in the airborne market.
There are opportunities in ground vehicles, he said. For example, there is a large opportunity for reset programs coming up in the next few years and “we felt we could do better,” getting out in front with EO systems more advanced than those available now.
The L-3 Wescam ground system is essentially a 67-pound system that two people can lift, compared to perhaps five to six pound airborne systems that have to conserve size, weight and power.
The rate of change of electro-optical capability is such that the chassis [these go into] will stay constant, what goes into (that space) changes on an 18-24 month cycle, Jennison said. The MX product line is modular so when the next camera capability comes along it can be seamlessly integrated without destroying the chassis.
The company has already shown the MX-RSTA to original equipment manufacturers (OEM).
In the first foray, they took a ruggedized airborne system and gave it to an OEM. The feedback and lessons learned was fed it into the current design.
Among the lessons learned from that first work was that airborne personnel might want controls and overlays that were more complex than ground troops would want.
Thus, a lot of the signal processing was automated so the operators didn’t have to adjust it themselves, he said.
The new ground MX-RSTA has brought from the airborne side “good image performance, crisp pictures, signal processing that gets the maximum out of cameras in the environment and is ruggedized,” Jennison said. This leverages company investment in electronics and optics.
“We believe when we get to market in mid next year, there will be a quantum leap in capability,” he said. Additionally, the system can be scaled up and down, depending on the need.
From the company perspective, after a successful business on the airborne side, they believe they can do the same on the ground side, and “ultimately customers will take us where we need to go,” Jennison said.
At AUSA, L-3 Wescam will have two operating ground electro-optical systems and an airborne system at booth 2124 in Hall B