BATTLESPACE Editor, Julian Nettlefold interviewed Chris Wiltsey, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Curtiss-Wright Defense Electronics Segment

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.

NASA has announced the first flight of an aircraft on another planet, and a piece of the Wright brothers' history gets to ride along.

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

Choosing a single vendor for a complete video management system massively reduces program risks and costs.

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.