Published in Military Embedded Systems
By Dan Taylor
Imagine a battlefield where tanks predict enemy movements, armored personnel carriers self-diagnose mechanical issues, and infantry fighting vehicles automatically adjust their defensive systems based on incoming threats. Thanks to advancements in vehicle electronics – or vetronics – and open architecture initiatives like CMOSS [C4ISR/EW (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance/electronic warfare) Modular Open Suite of Standards] this vision is closer to reality than ever before.
In the span of a generation, military vehicles have evolved from relatively simple mechanical beasts to rolling supercomputers. Today’s combat vehicles pack more processing power than entire command centers did just a few decades ago.
This exponential growth in capability brings with it a host of new questions: How do you keep these complex systems secure? How can you ensure they work seamlessly with older equipment? Perhaps most crucially, how do you design vehicle electronics (vetronics) to be easily upgraded as technology inevitably marches forward? These are the issues the defense industry must focus on in 2024 and beyond.
