British army ground vehicle uses rugged GE embedded computers for ISTAR capability
NewsJune 13, 2012
TOWCESTER, United Kingdom. General Dynamics UK officials chose embedded computing solutions from GE Intelligent Platforms for the British army?s Scout Specialist Vehicle Demonstration Phase. The contract is valued at $5 million.
The Scout SV family is a ground-based intelligence platform with a variety of high performance sensors, for Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) functions that uses the latest (20 Gbits per second) Gigabit Ethernet open architecture. The electronics enable it to analyze, capture, manipulate and store more than 6 TeraBytes of intelligence data, including a huge amount of still and moving images, and to share this intelligence in real-, or near real-time, depending on mission requirements. The capability gives commanders improved decision-making support than what is available only from airborne ISTAR platforms or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Data will be also be passed to other secure C4I systems, such as those belonging to the U.S. and other NATO allies.
The GE subsystems include rugged processors running on GE’s MAGIC1 and SBC624 Single Board Computer (SBC) and rugged Ethernet switches from GE’s GBX460. They will deliver data processing capability for Scout SV, manage the on-vehicle networks, control the data storage and drive the vehicle’s displays. GE also has provided commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS)-equivalent solutions to allow General Dynamics UK to start software development immediately.
