Engineers at several United States Air Force (USAF) bases now use NVision's HandHeld laser scanner to reverse-engineer complex aircraft parts, which are then accurately machined and installed. Reverse engineering is often required for aircraft that were originally designed without computer aided design systems (CAD), and for which even blueprints can be very difficult to obtain.

Fuel is one of the top three logistics drivers on the battlefield, along with water and ammunition. Fuel powers the vehicles that mobilize troops and keep communications and supply chains running, and is used in the generators that power forward operating bases. Transporting fuel to the front lines, however, has become extremely costly in both lives and dollars.

Building a multicore system means dealing with non-determinism. Interactions between tasks running on different cores can occur in a different order, and at a different rate from one run to the next. This makes it harder to reproduce, find, and fix bugs. It also lowers the probability that validations and QA have caught all problems.

Military and ISR operations are inundated with vast amounts of data collected from an expanding network of sources, including sensor data from UAS, satellites, and remote monitoring stations. Critical information must be processed quickly and reliably, and delivered in real time to command centers and forces on the battlefield. Processing this plethora of information requires a multitude of computers, many of which are outdated or on proprietary platforms. To remain sustainable, systems used for enterprise computing, field operations, warfighting, and command and control, must be continually upgraded or replaced. Many of these systems need to be integrated, consolidated, and securely linked to multiple networks.

The theaters of operation for marine, air and land vehicles continue to redefine the term “rugged environment.” No longer bound by on-board human operators, autonomous and unmanned military vehicles are now free to operate within unparalleled temperature, vibration and shock regimes. The limitation on survivability of such vehicles is defined primarily by the robustness of their internal electronics. To meet these challenges, suppliers of hardened electronic systems must employ various ruggedization techniques.

L-3 Link Simulation & Training (L-3 Link) recently delivered six additional Predator Mission Aircrew Training Systems (PMATS) and associated support equipment to two U.S. Air Force installations and one Air National Guard site. Four units were delivered to Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.; one was delivered to Cannon Air Force Base, N.M.; and one was delivered to the Syracuse Air National Guard at Hancock Field, N.Y. The systems support high-fidelity modeling of the Predator MQ-1 and Reaper MQ-9 unmanned aircraft.

Minnesota Wire’s R&D division, Minnovate, has been awarded a Phase One Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract by the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office (PEO) for Aviation. The objective of the R&D project, titled “Lightweight EMI Resistant Wiring Solutions,” is to demonstrate and develop technologies that can reduce the electromagnetic interference (EMI) susceptibility and impact of both existing and future power wiring harnesses on Army helicopters.