Quality assurance and flight certification of critical aerospace parts and assemblies have reached new levels of sophistication in recent years. Leading aerospace and defense manufacturers worldwide now consider computed tomography (CT) scanning to be an essential part of their non-destructive testing (NDT) toolkit. Far more powerful than the CT used to scan the human body, industrial CT can penetrate almost every material, from superalloys to lead, revealing hidden details that previously could only be found by cutting and destroying finished parts.

A desirable interface between multi-agents is through over-the-air RF connections that include not only the intended direct RF communications paths but also highly variable multi-ray propagation, range attenuation, external RF influences, and near-earth influence. These influences are all difficult to predict, control, and repeat in an outdoor environment. This outdoor testing, as has traditionally been done, is extremely expensive while simultaneously providing fewer data points than more controlled events and the testing events are generally not repeatable.

The purpose of this study was to assess the ability of commonly available COTS software to produce geometrically accurate orthometric mosaics and terrain models from low-altitude UAS imagery.

The main goals of this research are to enhance a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software platform to support unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) exploring the complex environment of tunnels, to test the platform within a simulation environment, and to validate the architecture through field- testing.

Ultra-Low Temperature Elastomer

Greene Tweed’s (Kulpsville, PA) Fusion™ FKM 665, a new generation, ultra-low-temperature and chemical-resistant elastomer, was specifically formulated to meet and exceed the requirements of Aerospace Material Specification (AMS) 7379 and AMS-P-83461. With a temperature range of -70°F to 450°F (-57°C to 232°C), Fusion™ 665 achieves outstanding low-temperature performance without compromising high-temperature performance.

Ruggedized Software Defined Radio Solutions

Pixus Technologies (Waterloo, Ontario) has developed ruggedized versions of commercial software defined radios. The RX310, the first in the series of small form factor ruggedized devices, utilizes the USRP software defined radios from Ettus Research, a National Instruments brand. The weatherproof enclosure features IP67 sealing for water and dust ingress. It is also designed for MIL-STD-810 for shock/vibration and MIL-STD-461 for EMI. The RX310 contains two extended bandwidth daughterboard slots covering 10 MHz – 6 GHz with up to 160 MHz of baseband bandwidth, dual 1/10 GigE high-speed interfaces, and a large user-programmable Kintex-7 FPGA. The unit is 302mm wide × 400mm long × 98mm tall with conduction-cooled fins for heat dissipation.

Active imaging systems offer the promise of significantly improved tactical performance compared to passive military systems operating in adverse ground, air, and underwater/ maritime environments. These improvements would include, but are not limited to:

Currently in the small arms community, with the push for lighter, stronger barrels with improved life, a more complete understanding of the bore's thermal and structural behavior is required in order to not only improve future barrel design but to more thoroughly and accurately assess barrels in the current inventory.

Defense-Grade FPGAs

Xilinx, Inc. (San Jose, CA) announced availability of its Defense-grade XQ UltraScale+ portfolio of products, providing the benefits of its UltraScale+ architecture plus extended temperature and ruggedized packages to address the needs of the aerospace and defense industry. The new products encompass the XQ Zynq^® UltraScale+ MPSoCs and RFSoCs, as well as XQ Ultra-Scale+ Kintex^® and Virtex ^® FPGAs.