Situational Awareness for Multi-Mission HEL Systems

High Energy Laser Weapons Systems (HELWS) have reached a sufficient level of maturity such that significant consideration of their integration into the existing force structure and command and control requirements must be accomplished before HELWS can be deployed to the battlefield. Toward this end, the proposed effort calls for the development of"...a novel concept for mapping out and maintaining keep out zones (no fire zones) for a scalable effects high power laser system that is capable of conducting a variety of missions"and to"...keep no fire zones as small as possible,"in order maximize the effectiveness of HELWS in the battlefield. We propose to develop a situational awareness computational system that uses sophisticated algorithms for calcuation of the irradiance of objects in the battlefield, integrates with existing command and control networks, and integrates with existing HELWS fire control architectures.