Appliance Deployment Featured Article

GE Intelligent Platforms (News - Alert) has just announced its daq8580 rugged streaming network appliance that has been designed to meet the growing requirement for unmanned vehicles to capture, process and transmit increasing quantities of video information at increasing resolutions. In addition, the appliance dramatically increases time to deployment.

The daq8580 extends GE's growing range of COTS Rugged Systems (CRS) that provide ready-to-run solutions that minimize Non Recurring Engineering (NRE) expense, company officials said.

The company also announced the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) has selected the appliance deployment platform, in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This solution will be installed onboard the Northrop Grumman (News - Alert) Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle, which is being deployed to conduct unprecedented atmospheric research.

The compact video compression platform measures 0.1" long by 7.3" deep, weighs only 5lbs and consumes only 25 watts of power. It is suitable for deployment in environments that are constrained in size, weight and power (SWaP), especially unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) where increased weight means increased fuel consumption  and reduced mission durations.

The ruggedized design ensures that daq8580 is highly resistant to the shock, vibration and other hostile characteristics typical of deployment in an unmanned vehicle. Its 28V power supply is designed to meet MIL-STD-704E and MIL-STD-1275B, so it is suitable for aircraft as well as ground vehicle operations.

“UAVs are being tasked with acquiring increased levels of video information through the use of HD optics to support improved pilot information as well as improved surveillance information," said Dan Veenstra, product manager, GE Intelligent Platforms, in a statement.

"Existing UAVs are having the optics upgraded and new UAVs are being fitted with HD optics,” Veenstra added. “We have designed the daq8580 to support a wide range of legacy video inputs as well as the latest HD video inputs, and its performance relative to its size and weight sets new standards for the industry."

Company officials say the appliance deployment platform can acquire two parallel streams of HD (1,920 x 1,080) at 30 frames/second or up to four channels of standard definition (SD) video. It can also support DVI or VGA modes up to 2,048 X 2,048 pixels.

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