The advent of unmanned systems reflects a huge aspect of warfare – that of protecting the warfighter – through the development of platforms that can be operated by humans from a distance, keeping them out of harm’s way.

From a design and engineering perspective, there are many moving parts to consider and combine in order to arrive at a position, navigation, and timing (PNT) truth. In addition, solutions must be easy to integrate into the available space on existing platforms, whether they are unmanned aerial systems (UASs) or other aircraft, ground-based operations, or systems at sea.

Military experts are developing new enabling technologies to help unmanned aircraft, ground vehicles, submarines, and surface vessels swarm and make decisions without human intervention.

New computer boards offer high performance, thermal management, and peripherals in a smaller size than 3U VPX, with artificial intelligence (AI) and GPGPU processing.

High data throughput and innovative thermal management may lead to a revolution in systems design that places the burden of electronics cooling on the enclosure more than on the card.

Components used in defence applications need to be not only reliable but rugged and, increasingly, interoperable with different ground and air vehicle systems. We talk to David Jedynak, chief technology officer at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions, about how the company helps its clients.

The standards currently being defined by the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Consortium will deliver many clear benefits to system integrators designing embedded sensor-processing systems. The SOSA Technical Standard will define common pinouts that foster and ease interoperability.

The proliferation of connected systems has been enabled by the U.S. military embrace of the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) revolution.