Minimizing latency can enhance situational awareness in tactical ground vehicles
StoryOctober 20, 2021
By Peter Green and Richard Pollard
An industry perspective from Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions
Through-armor video systems provide in-vehicle crews of manned and remote crews of unmanned ground vehicles with critical visibility and situational awareness. This vital visual information needs to be accessible as close to real-time as possible. Delayed video images can make warfighters unaware of an approaching enemy, an impending man-made or natural obstacle, or the unsafe proximity of a warfighter or civilian outside the vehicle, until it’s too late to appropriately or adequately respond. These risks increase when vehicles are moving quickly and when they include large and dangerous moving parts. It doesn’t take much imagination to consider the kinds of negative incidents that could occur when video images are delayed.
Through-armor video systems provide in-vehicle crews of manned and remote crews of unmanned ground vehicles with critical visibility and situational awareness. This vital visual information needs to be accessible as close to real-time as possible. Delayed video images can make warfighters unaware of an approaching enemy, an impending man-made or natural obstacle, or the unsafe proximity of a warfighter or civilian outside the vehicle, until it’s too late to appropriately or adequately respond. These risks increase when vehicles are moving quickly and when they include large and dangerous moving parts. It doesn’t take much imagination to consider the kinds of negative incidents that could occur when video images are delayed.
Video latency can also cause motion sickness for those inside the vehicle. When the images on the display don’t match the motion felt in the vehicle, the discrepancy can create inner-ear disturbances that lead to nausea, dizziness, and vomiting.
While the risks to human safety are significantly less when unmanned ground vehicles are used, the remote location of the vehicle driver means the video stream must travel further before it can be acted upon. This distance naturally increases the latency, compounding the dangers associated with delayed video streams. Video latency makes it extremely difficult for operators to have complete confidence that what they are seeing is the reality at the time. The combination of uncertainty and delayed images can cause hesitancy when responding to threats, collisions with obstructions or humans, or unknowingly driving the vehicle into a dangerous situation or landscape.
Three levels of ground-vehicle video systems
Ground-vehicle video systems vary widely in technical sophistication and capabilities, but can be categorized into three levels of sophistication:
- The most basic video systems enable operators who are in the vehicle, or operating it remotely, to view the images from one vehicle-mounted camera at a time. These systems provide a rudimentary level of visibility but severely restrict situational awareness.
- Multi-display and picture-in-picture solutions enable operators to see images from multiple vehicle-mounted cameras at once. This flexibility considerably increases situational awareness compared to single-view systems, as operators can consider their surroundings on all sides of the vehicle at all times. Operators can choose the optimal combination of camera views for the task or maneuver they are executing.
- 360-degree video systems give operators the ultimate level of situational awareness – blending accurate, fully stitched images from all vehicle-mounted cameras into a seamless, panoramic image that most closely resembles what the human eye sees. These images can further be enhanced with sensor fusion, data overlays, augmented reality, and so on to offer enhanced situational awareness, which leads to increased mission effectiveness.
Overcoming technical challenges
The key to reducing end-to-end latency in a video system is to reduce latency in each video system component, from cameras to video distribution and management units to displays. A British defense ministry study found that military-vehicle drivers could safely drive a vehicle through a visual display when the overall video system latency is 40 ms or less. A recent breakthrough in rugged deployed video situational awareness for manned and unmanned ground vehicles now makes it possible to provide a 360-degree through armor video-
management system that delivers <30ms
latency performance. Compared to alternative video situational-awareness and drivers visual enhancer (DVE) solutions that deliver >60ms latency, this level of system performance achieves the “sweet spot” of glass-to-glass latency to support driver aid and situational-awareness video at full HD resolutions.
An example of a video-management solution for through armor is Curtiss-Wright’s 360SA Video Management System (Figure 1).
[Figure 1 | The 360SA Video Management System is aimed at use in closed-hatch operation of tactical vehicles. Curtiss-Wright image.]
The 360A combines a low-latency video management system with a full-HD video ground mobile command control system and integrates projected capacitive (PCAP) rugged touch screen displays with a scalable, rugged video gateway and a video format converter. The MOSA [modular open systems ap-
proach] design is “camera-agnostic” and supports 20 x DS/HG/3G-SDI, 4 x composite/YC, and 1 x HDMI.
Peter Green serves as an engineering and business development director for Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions.
Richard Pollard serves as a senior product manager for Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions.
Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions https://www.curtisswrightds.com/
