Vehicle IT Focus Day: Monday, November 17, 2008

8:30 am – 9:00 am Registration and Coffee

9:00 am – 10:30 am Enhanced GPS Availability in Lightweight Vehicles

The global positioning system is integral to mission completion on the asymmetrical battlefield. In a combat situation, information can make the difference between a successful operation and failure. When soldiers wear Land Warrior systems, for example, their positions are displayed on the map in the Stryker vehicles, as well as on the Land Warrior system. When warfighters go into armored vehicles, it is all the more crucial for soldiers to maintain that data connection. How, therefore, is this connection maintained? How does the warfighter remain fully operational in order to achieve mission success?

A GPS repeater unit enables military personnel to operate handheld GPS units and GPS-enabled training equipment inside LAVs. This session will therefore delve into the details of how repeaters enable handheld units and equipment to maintain their data connection in LAVs, thereby providing the soldiers with accurate location data.

How you will benefit:

• Discover in detail the essential GPS needs of vehicle operators
• Learn from technical experts about achieving optimal GPS signal availability
• Understand how to obtain a continuous and complete picture of the battlefield in order to provide enhanced situational awareness

What you will learn about:

• Solution to real-time soldier location
• Repeater design, installation, and use
• Proven repeater solutions to enable full functionality of GPS applications with Humvees, MRAPs, and LAVs

Session Leader:

Robert Horton
Chief Executive Officer
GPS Source, Inc.

10:30 am – 12:00 pm Integrating and Networking Sensors, Weapons, and Communications for Military Vehicles

Lunch will be served

Historically, existing or emerging technologies are not easily adapted into military vehicles without major integration and upgrade costs. Each component has its own processor, controller, and wiring which adds weight and draws from the electrical load of the vehicle. As operational conditions change, the increasing cost of integrating sub-systems onto the chassis becomes overwhelming. It therefore becomes critical that a total system engineering approach must be designed into the architecture from the beginning, allowing for system flexibility to exist should future modifications be required.

How will you benefit:

• Understand how to make your component compatible for future vehicle integration
• Using a quantitative approach to system trades can solve future operational demands

What you will learn about:

• Plug and play processors that can operate on any vehicle with any weapons system, sensors device and communication module within the same network
• Resource oriented architectural design for small mobile platforms
• Routerless network that uses less than 1% of the available bandwidth

Session Leaders:

Gregory Glaros President Synexxus	Tommy Allen VP of Technology Synexxus
Chris Dour Vice President Synexxus	Nandita Mangal Software Design Engineer Synexxus

12:00 pm – 2:00 pm Design And Implementation Of Signal Processing Software For Lightweight Vehicles

Signal Processing plays a key role in the control, sensing, and communications functions performed on lightweight vehicles. Deployment of signal processing software is challenging due to stringent constraints on power consumption, performance, and predictability, along with the proliferation of alternative processing platforms that are geared toward signal processing. Such platforms include conventional single-processor devices, various kinds of embedded multiprocessor configurations, and field programmable gate arrays with signal processing accelerators, and other kinds of reconfigurable platforms.

How you will benefit:

• Obtain a better understanding of the methods involving the use of specialized, signal-processing-oriented programming models
• Discover models that capture high level behavior of applications that enable powerful optimization techniques
• Learn how models can be integrated flexibly with lower-level, platform-oriented programming tools

What you will learn about:

• Design methods and implementation techniques for high productivity
• High confidence development of signal processing software

Session Leader:

Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya
Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Maryland

2:00 pm – 5:00 pm Enhanced Situational Awareness from Inside Military Vehicles

This session will discuss how enhanced situational awareness allows vehicle crews to see outside in day or night while under armor, which therefore enables improved maneuvering in urban and complex terrains. This technology also allows vehicle crews to detect, track and engage dismounted and vehicular threats. The display technology enabling this capability will be presented along with the associated system level trades. Embedded real time image processing technology will also be discussed. In addition, embedded geo-referenced image and event recording will be demonstrated.

How you will benefit:

• Find out more about intelligent military display technologies
• Gain an understanding of the fundamental trades and issues associated with enabling armored vehicles with wide field-of-view situation awareness capability
• Delve into the use of advanced image processing techniques to enhance situation awareness

What you will learn about:

• Real time image processing overview and demonstrations
• Location based event recording demonstrations

Session Leader: Jim Olson
Director, Business Development
Digital Design Corporation