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.

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.

Military experts are developing new enabling technologies to help unmanned aircraft, ground vehicles, submarines, and surface vessels swarm and make decisions without human intervention.

In order to keep up with the continued acceleration of new technology and to be able to protect the warfighter from the latest threats, it is essential that we can turn our deployed platforms into adaptable entities that can evolve over time and are not static. The SOSA [Sensor Open Systems Architecture] Technical Standard is the next major step in realizing this goal.

Tammy Carter and David Jedynak discuss how huge data demands are pushing radar and electronic warfare (EW) developers to seek new ways to deliver multifunction systems that also meet strict size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements.

merging mission requirements from global defense forces are driving new programs and applications for Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) platforms.

There is significant commonality between unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and UUV environments with standard rugged military commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) embedded solutions often applicable to both.

J.R. Wilson with Military & Aerospace Electronics considers how Passive sensor systems may be ready to come into their own, as high-performance embedded computing technology becomes powerful enough to handle massive computing loads.