The advent of unmanned systems reflects a huge aspect of warfare – that of protecting the warfighter – through the development of platforms that can be operated by humans from a distance, keeping them out of harm’s way.

Today, multiple echelons - platoon, company, battalion, brigade, and division – are all trying to communicate with each other using different mechanisms, whether via line of sight (LOS) radios or beyond line of sight (BLOS) satellite communications (SATCOM).

As the U.S. Navy increases its investment in its fleet of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUV), suppliers of rugged commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) subsystems, providing solutions for mission computers, network switches, and routers, and data storage are meeting the needs of these unique platforms.

To maintain warfighter overmatch, the US military must deploy advanced technologies for situational awareness to the edge of the battlefield.

New computer boards offer high performance, thermal management, and peripherals in a smaller size than 3U VPX, with artificial intelligence (AI) and GPGPU processing.

As expeditionary forces consider how best to enable and maintain tactical communications in complex and contested environments, industry is exploring how next-generation capabilities such as AI, ML, and 5G connectivity can support emerging signal demands.

Charlie Kawasaki talks to the Shephard news team about technology in tactical communications programs.

The standards currently being defined by the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Consortium will deliver many clear benefits to system integrators designing embedded sensor-processing systems. The SOSA Technical Standard will define common pinouts that foster and ease interoperability.