GE Intelligent Platforms presents its new Local Situational Awareness Visualization System

References: GE Intelligent Platforms (1, 2)

News Report

As announced in a recent press release, GE Intelligent Platforms unveiled at AUSA 2011 (Association of the United States Army) the IPS5100, a complete, self-contained, ready-to-run platform that enables 360° local situational awareness and is capable of being easily integrated into a broad range of existing and new military vehicles. The rugged IPS5100 is specifically designed to have minimal impact in terms of size, weight and power (SWaP) on a vehicle, enabling it to be deployed in environments that are highly space-constrained.

The System

GE Intelligent Platforms’ IPS5100 is a rugged high performance 360° local situational awareness visualization computer that processes real-time video and can connect up to 20 cameras and up to 4 visual displays to present full 360° panoramic display to operators in vehicle (under armor) in a clear, understandable way. The ready-to-go open standard IPS5100 is optimized for size, weight and power (SWaP) using a rugged 3U VPX COTS system that can be easily integrated into new or existing tactical vehicle software, hardware and human/machine interfaces (HMI).

The capabilities of the IPS5100 include real-time panning and stitching, slew-to-cue pointing, motion detection and archive recording. The provided software is designed to be flexible and accommodate virtually any visualization functionality required by the user, including symbology overlay of metadata.

The high performance of the IPS5100 delivers a typical latency below 80ms, making it possible to drive a vehicle by using the real-time video images delivered by the IPS5100 system.

The IPS5100 measures 8.5” x 7.0” x 8.9”, and weighs ~20lbs.

The Context

The IPS5100 has been developed and refined through many man-years of working with vehicle operators and system and platform integrators, resulting in unprecedented portability, scalability and configurability that allows it to be integrated – using existing vehicle electronics - in an effective yet unobtrusive manner with existing tactical vehicle software, hardware and human/machine interfaces.

Comments

“The IPS5100 is unique in the way it addresses many of the key challenges that have prevented system integrators deploying true 360° situational awareness in the past,” said Al DiLibero, President, Military & Aerospace Embedded Computing at GE Intelligent Platforms. “It is available as an off-the-shelf visualization system with a high Technology Readiness Level (TRL), meaning that it can be rapidly deployed with absolute confidence.”

"By allowing troops to remain ‘under armor’ and therefore protected at all times, the IPS 5100 can make a significant contribution to troop safety. Without a system like this, the combatant would need to expose his head to survey the situation around him,” concluded DiLibero.