Detection of Hostile Fire from the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA)

ABSTRACT: Mid-band, fast framing focal plane arrays have been demonstrated to provide military utility for hostile fire detection, classification, and geolocation. This class of systems has been demonstrated to perform in this role at altitudes up to 10,000 ft for a broad class of threat systems and within the size, weight, and power constraints imposed by a Shadow class remotely piloted vehicle. This research proposes to verify and demonstrate the value of augmenting an existing hostile fire system with additional sensing modalities to enhance the system discrimination, enable higher altitude operation, and perform correlation of hostile fire events with imagery formatted for human operators in real time to enable high confidence threat engagement. BENEFIT: The benefits of this project are improved hostile fire detection capabilities that will be relevant to both military and law enforcement users. The proposed system concept will lower false alarm rates, provide certitude in target classification and discrimination at longer ranges and in more cluttered environments, and eventually lead to systems with full hemispherical fields of view will a lower system life cycle cost through more balanced system design and utilization of lower cost components.