I discussed the effect of FACE on the military avionics community, the involvement of the user community, the benefits of FACE Technical Standard 3.0, and other topics with Jeffry Howington of Collins Aerospace – also vice chairman of the FACE Consortium Steering Committee for nine years – in my McHale Report podcast (find the podcast on www.mil-embedded.com). Edited excerpts follow.

Basic physics still dictates much of what makes helicopter flight successful, but military airborne platforms are constantly faced with environments civilian rotary- and fixed-wing aircraft simply don’t encounter: Degraded visual environments, a need for reduced workload, and improved pilot-vehicle interface drive military helicopter avionics upgrades and remain at the top of customer design requirements. In response to these military-user needs, companies are attempting to uncomplicate helicopter cockpit designs while using the most advanced electronics available.

Each issue, the editorial staff of Military Embedded Systems will highlight a different charitable organization that benefits the military, veterans, and their families. We are honored to cover the technology that protects those who protect us every day. To back that up, our parent company – OpenSystems Media – will make a donation to every group we showcase on this page.

The U.S. military is developing new types of facial-recognition technologies – systems vitally important for the safety of soldiers in the field – to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems to perform identity verification and threat detection, but these advances can also come with some cybersecurity issues.

In this latest column for our ongoing series on Deep Learning, we will consider the question, “How can I teach my machine to learn?” Like humans, machines learn from experience. They make observations from inputs of images, text, or other data, and then look for patterns.

For integrators of deployed aerospace and military platforms, size, weight, and power (SWaP) is always at a premium. The use of smaller and lighter equipment enables more electronics payloads to be integrated, while the use of SWaP-optimized subsystems enables platforms to be more energy-efficient, to go farther and/or faster.

The November VITA Standards Organization (VSO) standards meeting was held in Tempe, Arizona. This update is based on the results of that meeting. Contact VITA if you are interested in participating in any of these working groups. Visit the VITA website (http://www.vita.com) for details on upcoming VSO meetings.

It all began with a good idea. Decades ago, unmanned systems first became force multipliers on the battlefield, increasing situational awareness and keeping fighters out of harm's way. Today they help realize the vision a multi-domain battlefield, but their benefits have reached across industries.

Military equipment—such as shipboard, surveillance, mobile artillery and control stations, combat aircraft and unmanned air vehicles—often consists of highly technological and sensitive electronics. It is likely that these electronics could be exposed to harsh environments, including extreme heat, dust, moisture, shock and vibration.

Each new defense platform asks more from embedded electronics. Designers respond with faster processors, more processors, more sensors, and faster interconnects. These leaps in embedded capability carry with them expanding complexity. Every new component is another potential point of failure. What does that do to mission reliability?

Video latency makes it extremely difficult for vehicle 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, collision with obstructions or humans, or to unknowingly drive the vehicle into a dangerous situation or landscape.