By Geoff Fein
New Hampshire-based Optical Alchemy Inc. (OAI) will unveil its latest unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) payload next month, a high definition camera that will provide small UAVs with similar capabilities to their larger counterparts, a company official said.
The new high definition capability being incorporated into the company’s KJ-600 series inertially stabilized sensor gimbal will make it Optical Alchemy the first company to be able to put a number of features in a package that is a little over six inches and weighs six pounds, John Scannell, president and chief operating officer, told Defense Daily yesterday.
“To the best of our knowledge OAI is the first and only supplier that offers this capability in an ‘ultra light’ package,” he said. “We think this would be of interest to the Marine Corps and the other services.”
The company will show its new payload at next month’s Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) expo in San Diego.
The KJ-600 will provide a significant increase in field of view for the warfighter, Scannell said. It will give them a much-needed tool for situational awareness.
“What we are saying is, why not have the same capabilities as the huge million dollar cameras,” he said.
Granted, the larger cameras have further standoff capability and a longer focal length, so they can typically be seven kilometers away versus what the KJ-600 can do, Scannell added.
A small UAV with the KJ-600 will likely be 3 kilometers away to pick up actionable intelligence, he said.
“But if you can have day and night vision, and have the high definition in one of these smaller, tactical UAV systems, that is exactly what [the services] need,” Scannell pointed out.
Delivering the high definition streaming video from the UAV to the ground station will likely require some infrastructure changes, he added, such as upgrading ground stations and displays.
“OAI is confident that once the warfighter sees the high definition capabilities in this size and weight class, they won’t want to live with the limits of existing gimbals,” Scannell said. “We believe that the acceptance curve will be similar to that experienced with HD TVs. At first it was slow to catch on, now it is everywhere… the standard.”
Additionally, because the systems are smaller they are less expensive and the platforms are less expensive, he added. “It’s a significant cost savings across the board on these Tier II options.”
The company has been working to be able to package this much capability in a small package since 2002, Scannell said. “The reasons there are not many out there [doing it, is] because it is really hard.”
Another feature is that the camera is geo-referenced, he noted.
“It means we can actually lock on to a target and provide soldiers on the ground, actually give them the latitude, longitude and elevation reading of the bad guy,” Scannell said. “Other people are giving pictures…imagery…but they can’t give exactly where the people are. We send down the information that says you have a bad guy [and] the latitude, longitude and elevation reading is here. It’s very impressive.”
Being able to provide an exact latitude and longitude of an adversary will enable ground forces to either deploy additional UAVs for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions or deploy a team to take out the adversary, he added.
“Or we can pass on the geo-referencing information to another UAV that might have precision strike capabilities, and then that will be able to take out the enemy,” Scannell said.
And because the sensor is geo-referenced and inertially stabilized, Scannell sees the potential for use on unmanned ground vehicles.
“We are quoting on some right now, working with customers that are modeling it,” he said. “We have a strong interest…pull from the market, and we have a strong interest in playing in that industry.”