Military Avionics Technology Exhibition, UK

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Military Avionics Technology Exhibition arranged by the UK MOD, and held at the Defence Equipment and Support Agency's Abbey Wood headquarters. This  was an impressive venue, although I don't think I quite got used to the 'Bomb Shelter' signs on the deep walls of the lecture theatre and exhibition hall no matter how often I glanced at them.

The event started with a talk by Air Cdre George Baker, who discussed a number of issues related to through-life capability, which was a recurring theme in the subsequent industry presentations. I often find at these sort of events, that some of the presentations will bring up something completely new and/or unexpected, and this was no exception.

Neil MacTavish of Nallatech gave a very insightful presentation on the use of reconfigurable computing in airborne applications, and described a case study involving an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) using of 3 CCD cameras and reconfigurable processing nodes to achieve "see and avoid". This system was able to detect an aircraft approaching at 1.5 nautical miles, including aircraft below (which can be difficult to detect against the ground). If these results can be obtained in the visible spectrum, imagine what can be achieved with multi-spectral and hyper-spectral sensors? This could be a significant step in overcoming the technical barriers of UAVs operating in non-segregated airspace, provided of course that the software was safety certified to the appropriate level.

This is something that I discussed in the earlier blog: UAV Roadmap, and also in a paper which I presented at the Wind River Regional Developer's Conference in Stockholm in March - that was another event where I learned a lot - but about space from Wind River's Mike Deliman, and in particular the Mars Rovers. Mike will be around to talk to people at our forthcoming Regional Developers Conference in Manhattan Beach (Los Angeles), but if you're on this side of the Atlantic, you might  want to come along to one of our European Aerospace & Defence Seminars. I can't promise any beaches, but we will be presenting some leading edge technologies.

Hope to see you there!