ITT [ITT] and Mercury Computer Systems [MRCY] plan to begin initial delivery to the Army this fall of its system designed to fuse and catalogue large volumes of video imagery collected by sensors aboard multiple unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), the partnering companies said.
The Army awarded ITT the contract to provide its Federated Embedded inteL-server for the Collaborative Operations, or FELCO, system, the companies announced at the annual Association of the United States Army exposition recently.
The Army issued the contract under its Federated Universal Synchronization Engine (FUSE) program. The system consisting of hardware and software combines video feeds and sensor data from the UASs and allows the end users to view or share geospatial intelligence imagery simultaneously and in real time.
The FELCO system can vary in size and weight depending on the assessed need for capacity and the platform on which it is being installed, but consists of the same open architecture components and is made up of commercial off the shelf technology (COTS), said Danny Rajan, the director of Geospatial Information Solutions at ITT.
“There are a number of things we are looking at to add into these systems,” Rajan said. “We are also talking with our customer about other options.”
FELCO can be deployed on the ground or airborne and can go on a broad array of platforms, he said. The imagery can be downlinked to computers or even handheld devices, he said.
Ray Petty, vice president and chief operating officer at Mercury, said FELCO’s appeal is that by using technology already available it can be quickly produced and fielded during a time of tightening budgets.
“There are not going to be the funds available for four to five to six years of development when an 80- percent solution is available now,” he said.
The Army said earlier that teams sent to Afghanistan determined there was a need to enhance the usefulness of data being gathering by UASs. Fusing the imagery and creating an operational picture would allow the Army to react more quickly to emerging threats or other enemy activities.