SEPTEMBER 2022AEROSPACEDEFENSEREVIEW.COM8In My OpinionThe future of combat will increasingly leverage both unmanned and optionally unmanned fighting vehicles. A key driver for the use of unmanned platforms is their ability to collect data without putting warfighters in harm's way. A resulting challenge is how to store the massive amounts of sensor data collected onboard the unmanned platform and how to ensure that data is secure in case the platform should get lost and fall into the wrong hands. Adding to this problem is the inexorable rate of increase in sensor data resolution. For example, where we had HD video just a few years ago, we are now seeing requirements to support 4K video, which will itself soon be supplanted by 8K video. To turn all of this valuable data into actionable intelligence requires significant amounts of processing, some of which can take place onboard the platform if powerful and rugged enough compute resources are available. Onboard processing enables a reduction in the size of the data, enabling key data to be downloaded in realtime to analysts at the Forward Operating Base (FOB). Unfortunately, the data downlink transports available from unmanned vehicles have been unable to keep pace with the fire hose of data that these platforms are now able to collect and store. The good news is that advances in processing technologies, such as the use of GPU enabled devices to drive AI and ML applications, can help optimize data sizes to fit through a realtime pipe. Using a "store and forward" approach, a rugged high density storage system onboard the platform can be used to store and protect all of the collected data at full resolution for post-mission analysis, after the drone, for example, returns to base. During the mission, subsets of sensor data (think of low resolution thumbnail images) can be created by compressing the data or adjusting the sampling rate to produce an acceptable and "good enough" representation of that data to fit into the realtime transport pipe for immediate transmission. This approach can quickly provide usable information, such as sensor, video, positional, thermal, or fuel data, for example. What's more, forwarding thin-pipe level By Dominic Perez, CISSP, CTO, Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions and a Curtiss-Wright Technical Fellow [CW: NYSE]PROTECTING AND ANALYZING DATA FROM UNMANNED PLATFORMS AT THE EDGE OF THE BATTLEFIELDDominic Perez
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