Special Feature certain military standards under consideration but appropriate testing has not been done to ensure compliance with military standards. Buyers need to ensure that the system they are investigating for purchase has not only been designed but also “qualified” to meet military standards. To be truly mission-ready, stand-alone rugged boxes should at minimum meet the military standards for temperature, shock, vibration and ingress conditions relevant to the target platform under consider-
ation. For example, the operating environment inside a climate-controlled cargo aircraft will differ greater from an externally mounted device onboard a wheeled personnel vehicle. Additionally, there is an increasing demand for these boxes to be prequalified for MIL-STD-461E for electromagnetic interference/compatibility (EMI/EMC) and power supply operation (per MIL-STD-1275D/MIL-STD-704E). System failures due to voltage surges and spikes cannot be tolerated.
Stand-Alone Rugged Boxes at Work Among the many military units deploying stand-alone rugged boxes is the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The NSWC recently implemented Parvus’ DuraCOR 810 computer and DuraMAR 1000 mobile router in the Navy’s newest class of surface warship, the Littoral Combat System (LCS) (Figure 1). The LCS operates manned and unmanned vehicles for conducting mine warfare, anti-submarine warfare and surface warfare. Two DuraCORs and one DuraMAR unit are installed in each LCS Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) to carry out these warfare missions. Stand-alone rugged boxes also caught the eye of Smiths Detection, a leading technology developer and manufacturer of sensors that detect and identify explosives, chemical and biological agents, weapons and contraband. Smiths Detection specified the DuraCOR 810 as the central computing unit for its Chemical Biological Protective Shelter (CBPS). CBPS shelters provide medical personnel and soldiers a highly mobile, self-contained collective protection system. With a contamination-free, environmentally controlled working area, these shelters serve medical combat services and combat service support personnel as mobile medical aid stations, field command posts or emergency facilities.
Rugged Boxes in UAVs Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles are also tapping into the benefits of stand-alone rugged boxes as demonstrated by Aurora Flight Sciences’ deployment of the common mission computer for the GoldenEye 80 Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) (Figure 2). The GoldenEye 80 is an advanced Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft designed to carry advanced sensor payloads for homeland security and battlefield operations. Aurora uses a stand-alone rugged box based on the small form factor DuraCOR 820 (Figure 3) mission computer subsystem dubbed the Aurora Common Mission Computer (ACMC). The computing architecture for this Parvus subsystem is based on a low-power mobile Pentium CPU, solid-state memory, Linux operat[ 24Untitled-7 ] COTS1Journal April 2009
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