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in briEF Rebuilding communities Team Rubicon (Booth 137) recruits, trains, equips, organises and deploys veterans to aid in disaster response operations around the world, demonstrating to society and individual veterans alike that veterans are powerful resources with skills to be harnessed. Team Rubicon offers veterans a unique opportunity to be part of humanitarian efforts with a unified purpose, mission and intensity that is reminiscent of military experience. The team-based model gives veterans the opportunity to be part of a larger community with a shared vision, creating a familiar sense of belonging and comradeship. Team Rubicon has been involved in more than 225 missions to rebuild communities following disasters ranging from hurricanes and tornadoes to floods and earthquakes. More than 70,000 volunteers are committed to serve, while some 10,000 veterans have been deployed to over 20 countries.
Soldier protection
Revision Military (Booth 610) is a solutions provider specialising in protective equipment, primarily protective eyewear, armour, and head systems, along with innovations in power management and integrated systems. Since its launch in 2001, Revision has delivered 1.1 million helmets to the US military, an additional 300,000 helmets internationally and a worldwide combined total of more than eight million units of spectacles, goggles and Rx carrier adaptors. It has also successfully supplied numerous Nerv Centr power management systems to customers in the US Marine Corps and Air National Guard Joint Terminal Attack Controllers. The recent acquisition of Protonex will enable further expansion of its power management systems.
DaviD DonalD With a worldwide fleet of more than 400 MQ-9 Reaper/ SkyGuardians, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc (GAASI) is hoping that Canada will also select the type to answer its remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) requirement, a solution for which is expected to be selected some time before 2022. To bid for the RPAS contract, and to deliver it if successful, GA-ASI has formed Team SkyGuardian Canada (TSC, Booth 1430). The team includes Canadian companies L3 Wescam as electro-optic sensor provider, MDA for data exploitation technologies, and CAE, which is GA-ASI’s worldwide training partner for the MQ-9. TSC is expected to grow as it
www.janes.com/CANSEC
‘Five-Eyes’ com A developmental SkyGuardian is seen during its history-making transatlantic crossing in July 2018 from Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, to RAF Fairford in England
adds more Canadian companies, including SMEs. Not only would such companies benefit from any Canadian contract, but also gain access to the global MQ-9 fleet and its operators, expanding opportunities for export. The RPAS requirement envisages an armed strike capability from the outset, for which SkyGuardian is already cleared with a range of weapons. Following development work performed for the UK’s STANAG 4671-compliant
Protector programme, SkyGuardian can be certificated with co-operative and nonco-operative detect-and-avoid technologies for operations in non-segregated airspace, an important consideration for certain missions such as maritime domain awareness. GA-ASI also asserts that SkyGuardian is ideally
Battlespace drone control robin HugHEs Ottawa-based geospatial and defence technology house Kongsberg Geospatial (Booth 915) is introducing a multidomain control system for co-ordinating the use of drones in the battlespace. Over the past four years, the company has developed an airspace awareness system for operating unmanned aerial systems (UAS) beyond visual line-of-sight, called IRIS UxS. The IRIS system was developed to help commercial drone operators safely operate beyond visual line-ofsight. It integrated realtime data from sensors and other sources to create an accurate picture of the airspace around a drone. This presented users with an integrated display with a 3D map showing exactly where their drone is, and all the terrain, navigation hazards and other aircraft and drones in the vicinity.
Since then, IRIS has been developed into a fully fledged multiplatform control system integrated with a variety of autopilot systems, allowing a single operator to actively control multiple drones from a single station. Kongsberg Geospatial has now introduced a new, military-focused version of the IRIS system – IRIS UxS – based on its participation in NATO STANAG 4817 standard for multidomain control stations. The new system collects and fuses data from a wide range of sensors,
allowing operators to control multiple autonomous vehicles in a multidomain mission theatre. IRIS UxS integrates different kinds of geospatial data and sensor input
to create a composite operating picture that includes the airspace, 3D terrain, bathyscape (undersea terrain visualisation), and features from S-57 nautical charts. The system leverages a real-time DDS bus architecture and sensor fusion technology that allows operators to simultaneously track and operate drones in the air, on the water and underwater. “We’ve successfully proven we can co-ordinate manned, unmanned, aerial, and ground assets in the civilian emergency mission space,” Ranald McGillis, president of Kongsberg Geospatial, told the Show Daily. “Now we’ve implemented the STANAG standard in a way that can make it easy to integrate unmanned systems in the military mission space.” The company anticipates that its work relating to co-ordinating unmanned platforms with larger manned vehicles will help to evolve new ways of visualising multidomain mission spaces for other command and control purposes.
