The EOC has been involved with the development of night vision equipment products because of the critical role of this technology to the Warfighter. With up to 80 percent of combat missions occurring at night, it is critical our Warfighters maintain tactical superiority with this equipment. Our expertise involve prototyping and testing of weapon-mounted sights, goggles, and hand-held systems.
In addition to our expertise in component level product testing, we have also developed a NIST-traceable image intensifier tube machine vision test. The EOC’s Automated Intensifier Measurement System (AIMS) is the first to test intensifier tubes through an automated objective process rather than a subjective manual process. In so doing, we are able to reduce the test cycle; reuse components that were thought to be non-functional; and reduce the backlog demand for intensifier tubes. Through this we will save the government over $20,000,000 per year.
We will continue to advance state-of-the-art in night vision technology through advancements in wide field-of-view goggles, digital detectors, and fusion goggles. Further, we will work to expand the use of the AIMS systems to include additional intensifier tube form factors. Through these efforts we will seek to reduce the development cycle, reduce costs and continue to provide the tactical superiority U.S. troops currently realize.
The EOC’s expertise in this area ranges from Near IR to Long Wave IR and covers a full complement of radiometric testing, evaluations of performance against elevated operation temperatures, development of novel focal plane array assembly techniques, and participation in ManTech efforts in a variety of focal plane array improvement programs. Further research into VIS-NIR focal plane arrays has encompassed electron multiplying charge-coupled devices; Electron-Bombarded Active Pixel Sensors (EBAPS) and other low light sensors; and participation in design, development and initial prototyping of new EBAPS devices.
The EOC’s expertise in this area ranges from Near IR to Long Wave IR and covers a full complement of radiometric testing, evaluations of performance against elevated operation temperatures, development of novel focal plane array assembly techniques, and participation in ManTech efforts in a variety of focal plane array improvement programs. Further research into VIS-NIR focal plane arrays has encompassed electron multiplying charge-coupled devices; Electron-Bombarded Active Pixel Sensors (EBAPS) and other low light sensors; and participation in design, development and initial prototyping of new EBAPS devices.
The EOC develops novel systems and components needed for the acquisition and processing of critical data for the Warfighter.
We provide low-risk, low-cost, and high-performance panoramic imagers with the primary benefit to the US Warfighter. The EOC has developed panoramic imagers for use in military applications such as the SuperBuoy; a submarine-launched situational-awareness panoramic imager; and the Sea Monkey, an unmanned underwater situational-awareness vehicle. We have also leveraged our expertise in surveillance systems to improve the Cerberus tower.
We will continue to develop imaging systems that provide critical information to the Warfighter by providing our customers with custom surveillance solutions that address technology gaps and fulfill specific needs
Our future efforts will include work towards solving harbor security issues by developing a man-portable, mast-mountable renewable energy surveillance camera. We will use our expertise in sensors, panoramic imaging, fiber optics, and UAV networks to build common digital sensor architectures that can be used in a ship/harbor environment.
We plan to take our research toward developing small, high-resolution, low-power solutions with open and extensible architecture and transfer these surveillance solutions to the Warfighter.
We excel in research and development of sensors for unmanned systems. Starting from specific customer and operational requirements, our engineers assess the development and implementation trade space to determine how to achieve optimal performance at affordable costs. Our solutions typically focus on mechanisms for leveraging existing components and technologies to decrease development time, development costs, and life cycle costs.
A notable success is the development of a geo-referencing mapping camera for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that provides highly accurate, real-time geo-referenced imagery for mapping and targeting. This camera was designed for tier 2 UAVs and it decreases target location error to two meters. This UAV technology provides the Warfighter with all of the benefits of a bigger system in a smaller, less expensive package that allows for more flexibility and frequency of use to smaller groups of soldiers who might not have access to large, strategic-level-asset UAVs. To support this camera and enable distributed airborne processing of data and sensor networks, we developed a novel flexible network architecture. Our Hydra architecture allows for the rapid integration of a variety of sensors.
We also used our expertise to develop sensor systems for unmanned ground vehicles. In our Integrated Multi-Sensor Payload (IMSP) project we successfully mounted a mm-wave sensor onto an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) as its primary payload. The mm-wave sensor is able to see clearly through environments and materials that other sensors cannot, such as fog and clothing. In other ground robotics applications we have developed sensors for small Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) platforms like the Talon.
In support of our sister organization, the Pennsylvania State University, Applied Research Lab, we designed, fabricated, and tested a family of high-resolution, stabilized, panoramic imagers that substantially leveraged the rapidly-evolving consumer electronic market. These systems have been deployed on surveillance buoys and the Sea Maverick unmanned underwater vehicle.
