Engagement

Silicon Valley Group Team

The Silicon Valley consortium (Team Leader: Norman Gregory) was established to take forward a number of separate elements of research in technology and conceptual goals for unmanned vehicles, with the objective of producing a complete system that would be semi-autonomous and would be able to detect, identify, monitor and report the position of a number of specific threats within an urban environment.

The consortium comprises the following organisations:

The Challenge

To develop a robust autonomous system that provides real-time or near real-time intelligence data against certain types of threats in an urban environment is a challenge in itself. To have a system that has extremely low visual and acoustic signatures with resistance to countermeasures is certainly a grand challenge!

The ground-breaking RoboHumatics© principles and tuned image recognition software being developed by the two Universities in the consortium, together with a novel solution to detect IED command wires by IDUS Consultancy, provides an extremely sound base upon which to develop the Silicon Valley semi-autonomous portable threat identification system (APHIDS).

The System

The Silicon Valley APHIDS initiative is based upon a user-optimised command/control system that has the capability to control multiple platforms and sensor suites, both air and ground based, as well as having a modular interface potential to process sensor data and output with an effective HMI display. The integration and processing of electro-optical and audio sensor data, together with specialist targeted other data, enables a high degree of confidence to be established in data capture and threat assessment. The consortium does not underestimate the challenge of integrating a number of emerging technologies, but believes that the unique range of skills amongst its members bodes well in its endeavours to produce a prototype APHIDS system that will be functional in summer 2008.

The Future

The Silicon Valley consortium has incorporated a defined exploitation strategy into the programme with high hopes in developing a number of related and valuable products from this interesting research project.