Coming Soon: Cockpit in Combat Trucks 

February 2009
By Grace V. Jean
National Defense Magazine

Soldiers would like to control their vehicle-based technologies — sensors, communications, blue force tracking and weapons — from a single interface, just as civilians access multiple programs from their desktop computers.

The answer may come in the form of cockpit-like technology that could turn plain humvees into multimedia hubs. It also would allow soldiers to control sensors and weapons from the safety of their armored cabs.

But engineers caution that providing these technologies to ground vehicles is tough because most combat trucks have overcrowded cabins that are already cluttered with multiple monitors and processors. Vehicles also are laden with heavy armor, which limits the amount of weight a truck can safely carry.

An integrated cockpit-style setup aboard trucks would greatly benefit troops who rely heavily on sensors and robots, such as those in explosive ordnance disposal units, experts say. Those soldiers have been frustrated by the necessity of hopping from one monitor to the next in order to perform various tasks, including searching for bombs, controlling robots, staying aware of their surroundings, keeping tabs on enemy movement and communicating with friendly forces.

Deployed explosive ordnance disposal units last year asked the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force to help them integrate five of their oft-used systems into a single command-and-control center aboard one of their vehicles. They wanted to be able to view video feeds, drive two robots, monitor the battlefield and communicate via the blue force tracking system.

The Army attempted to take the video feeds and plug them into a single monitor and display them in a quad-screen layout. But that effort was deemed inadequate and not as functional as troops had wanted.

“You can’t just wire things together — there’s nothing common about any system, and that’s the problem. You can’t just plug it into a monitor and expect it all to work,” says Greg Glaros, president of SYNEXXUS Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based company that the Rapid Equipping Force approached to develop the integration concept.

The REF asked SYNEXXUS to develop an architecture capable of accepting any current or future equipment, to include weapons, communications gear and robotics, and integrate the resulting information so that it could be used, manipulated, shared, networked and traversed inside a vehicle.

Within 96 days, the firm produced a prototype technology that is called the “electronic keel.” The system is essentially a black box processor that takes in analog signals from a variety of technologies and converts them to an Internet data format and then distributes the information via cellular, wireless or satellite network to soldiers, says Nandita Mangal, software design engineer. Hardware can be connected directly into the 60-pound system, which is cooled on the interior and offers protection from electromagnetic interference, she adds.

The information is piped onto a touch screen display that is mounted on a swivel arm inside the vehicle. Several function keys line the bottom of the 12-pound monitor and each corresponds to a technology or sensor that is plugged into the data distribution system or fed over a network. With a single touch, troops can call up individual video feeds or flip through images, manipulate a robot, fire a weapon, pull up maps and chat. The technology is based on the Linux operating system, but many of its interface features are modeled after Apple’s user-friendly iMac computers.

“We’re putting 70 pounds into the vehicle, but we’re taking out a couple hundred,” says Chris Dour, vice president of SYNEXXUS. The single display eliminates the need for all the proprietary monitors and computers that load down vehicles. Not only is it saving space and weight, but the technology also draws less power than all the systems it replaces — a two-thirds reduction in electricity demand, Glaros points out. “It’s a hat trick: size, weight and power,” he says.

Last fall, the system was installed in a Cougar variant of the mine resistant ambush protected vehicle for testing at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. Company representatives connected to the system a suite of explosive ordnance disposal and Army technologies — gyro cam sensors, driver vision enhancement infrared sensors, Foster-Miller’s Talon robot, iRobot’s Packbot and Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below, or FBCB2.

“We showed we can install it very quickly … and allow all of those elements to be coordinated together from essentially a cockpit-like setting that allows these soldiers to operate all their systems at once,” says Glaros.

The soldiers took the system through two daytime and two nighttime scenarios that tested its capabilities in an urban combat area with hidden improvised explosive devices. Using Xbox and PlayStation controllers, the troops were able to operate both robots simultaneously while sitting side-by-side in the vehicle.

“They completed their missions faster because they were able to coordinate all their sensors together to prosecute their targets,” says Glaros.

The system also allows for the entire mission and corresponding feeds to be recorded and retrieved for analysis and intelligence — a drastic improvement over the photos and paper reports that units currently are filing.

“It brought them into the information age literally overnight,” says Glaros.

The company is sending 10 systems to Iraq.

This technology sounds similar to what the Army is striving for in its pursuit of Future Combat Systems — a network of ground vehicles, weapons, robots and other technologies currently in development for fielding by 2015, Glaros says. He believes this technology could be incorporated into FCS vehicles at relatively low cost because the components are bought off the shelf.

“Our entry point was with the Rapid Equipping Force and the EOD community, but it is applicable in any vehicle,” Dour asserts. The team is focusing on the upcoming competition for the all-terrain MRAP that the military wants to field to troops in Afghanistan. One of the requirements is the integration of subsystems inside the vehicles.

Though the requirements of the EOD community were specific to robots and cameras, SYNEXXUS officials say the electronic keel can be applied to other war fighting units. “Because our architecture is so flexible and open-minded, we can also support weapons, communications, and any other [government-furnished equipment] that can be plugged into the system,” says Mangal.

SYNEXXUS initially encountered some resistance from manufacturers who were reluctant to part with certain information to make their systems compatible with the electronic keel. But once they discovered the benefits of opening up their technologies, the companies hopped on board, says Glaros.

“I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to start to talk about commercial standards so that it does make it easier for everyone to bring things together instead of the fashion they have done it,” he says.

The military has spent billions of dollars in aviation programs to give pilots integrated hands-off technologies in the cockpit. But it has not invested such effort on ground vehicles. The demand for such technologies may increase as a result of the growing number of injuries and deaths attributed to snipers taking potshots at troops who operate exposed gun turrets and poke their heads out of hatches.

“We’re supporting efforts by the military to be able to operate in more of a closed-hatch environment on these vehicles,” says Mark Chapin, business development director for Sarnoff Corp., which produces cameras and other sensors to help troops discern their surroundings.

Joysticks traditionally have helped soldiers control pan-tilt-zoom cameras and other weapons and sensors from vehicle cabins. But when they stare at a monitor and spin the camera numerous times, their orientation often becomes distorted and they lose track of which direction the cameras are aimed. When vehicles are in motion, manipulating the joystick becomes an even more difficult task with the jostling and bouncing around. Troops have said that they want a more intuitive manner of controlling the view.

Companies are beginning to replace those joysticks with helmet-mounted tracking systems that correlate the movement of the head to the movement of the camera. If a soldier wearing such a system looks 90 degrees to left, for example, he will peer “through” the skin of the vehicle and see outside. “That gives him a better perspective and supplies better situational awareness,” says Mike Donfrancesco, vice president of sales at InterSense Inc., which produces tracking technologies commonly used for aviation training and simulation. The company makes the InertiaHawk system, an optical sensor that tracks troops’ head movements.

The EOD community was one of the first adopters of the head-aimed controller system, says Martha Jane Chatten, chief financial officer at Chatten Associates based in West Conshohocken, Pa. The company produces a head-aimed remote viewer technology that incorporates InterSense tracking. Troops wear a head tracker and a head-mounted display that shows them the view from sensors aboard bomb disposal robots, such as the Talon or Packbot.

“Instead of controlling the camera with a joystick, troops just look around very naturally and they essentially feel like they’re sitting on a robot and driving downrange,” she says. If a microphone is placed on the robot, they could listen to what it hears. Likewise, if they put a laser rangefinder on the robot, they could build a picture of the world around the robot, she adds.

The next step for the company was to make a similar system that would sit on the exterior of a combat vehicle. Troops can stay in the cabin and still see around the vehicle without having to stick their heads out, Chatten says.

“The real advantage is to bring the head control into it. You immediately get a two-to-four times increase in your ability to do the job by adding head-aiming,” she says. That gives troops three benefits: less operator workload, better situational awareness and good tracking at high zoom.

Sarnoff manufactures several vehicle sensors and displays. It has partnered with InterSense on a head-aiming system that would allow troops to direct its cameras and sensors with their body motions. That function one day may be accomplished with a handheld device, such as a personal digital assistant.

A handheld PC with the tracking technology could be passed around amongst a squad to look around at its surroundings in real time before troops dismount the vehicle for a mission, says Donfrancesco.

“When the head tracking or handheld determines that there’s motion, on a frame-by-frame basis, that information is sent to our processing to update the field of view that’s being displayed,” explains Mike Piacentino, technical director of vision systems at Sarnoff. The position is fed directly into the processing with a low latency path.

“You’re taking a load off the operator,” says Chapin.

Troops not only can control the sensors’ motions by the head tracking system, but they also can drive the weapons systems found atop the vehicles. “Now you don’t have to have somebody on the roof of the vehicle trying to aim that weapon system and getting shot at,” says Piacentino.