ITT Corp. [ITT] and Mercury Computer Systems Inc. [MRCY] yesterday jointly said they have agreed to combine their respective technology expertise and jointly develop an airborne solution that meets the interoperability needs of tactical warfighters.
The new system is expected to be the fastest means of transforming raw sensor and metadata into geospatial intelligence in a small, standards-compliant configuration while a mission is on-station.
This joint initiative leverages core competencies from both companies to address the latency and data integrity inherent in current processing, exploitation and dissemination (PED) systems, the companies said in a statement.
ITT provides mission critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems built upon decades of experience and expertise in designing solutions for image, video and metadata collection, analysis, visualization, exploitation and dissemination.
Mercury Computer Systems is a trusted provider of commercially developed, high- performance, standards-based application-ready subsystems for the ISR market and is known for its turnkey professional engineering services and rapid production capabilities, the statement said.
“For nearly a decade, ITT has developed and deployed software-based scalable, flexible, standards-based enterprise solutions to address the community needs of video and imagery interoperability to provide direct and assured geospatial information,” said Danny Rajan, director, Geospatial Information Solutions, part of ITT Defense & Information Solutions. “This partnership will result in technology that streams imagery and video intelligence from an unmanned aerial system (UAS) platform to operational users. This combination of high-performance hardware and on-board data processing will substantially improve users’ ability to obtain situational awareness in real-time.”
Brian Perry, vice president of Services and Systems Integration at Mercury Computer Systems, said: “As the proven leader in ISR subsystems that meet the extreme and ever-changing demands of today’s warfighter, Mercury brings a proud heritage of innovation to this partnership with ITT. By combining our technology and integration expertise with ITT’s application software, we again will set the standard for an extremely high-performance, real-time, embedded computing solution for Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination (PED) applications on-board UAV platforms.”
ITT holds leadership positions in several standards organizations. Collectively, these form the building blocks of the PED architecture and directly apply to addressing the warfighter requirements. ITT continues to deliver both integrated Mission Solutions and commercial off-the-shelf software that will advance users’ ability to access and exploit geospatial intelligence.