Distributed Maritime Operations – Environmental Intelligence (DMO-EI)

The Sequential Phase II builds upon the work completed under Army SBIR Topic #A19-071, Weather Situational Awareness in the Cockpit, which focuses on providing graphical environmental intelligence (EI) in the cockpit of tactical aircraft.  Under this subsequent Phase II effort, PEMDAS proposes to develop a prototype Distributed Maritime Operations – Environmental Intelligence (DMO-EI) system to support Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard manned and unmanned Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms and missions. Using the prototype machine-to-machine capabilities currently being established in the Army SBIR, PEMDAS will expand the flight envelope of environmental situational awareness from low altitudes supporting the Army to middle and high altitudes common to Navy manned and unmanned aviation operations. Further, situational awareness will be expanded and tailored to meet the dynamic environmental concerns beyond icing to include turbulence, lightning, and high-altitude jet stream winds. Additionally, airborne atmospheric sensors will be adapted to designated manned and unmanned platform to demonstrate the operational utility of sensing to provide real threat warnings and displays to pilots and operators.  The prototype DMO-EI will employ machine-to-machine processing to derive Navy mission decision products to improve success and enhance survivability. Examples of decision products are real-time cloud and icing layers, cloud-free line-of-sight ranges, localized winds, and lightning. This sequential SBIR will also initiate application of basic artificial intelligence (AI) concepts to generate predictive mission information capabilities for autonomous platforms. PEMDAS proposes to execute this subsequent SBIR effort through four major technical objectives. Technical Objective (TO 1) will design the prototype DMO-EI system relevant to Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard ISR platforms and missions. Technical Objective (TO 2) will build and test prototypes for the DMO-EI subsystems: Collect and Store, Process, and Interoperability. Enhanced subsystems will be integrated into a complete prototype DMO-EI system and tested. Technical Objective (TO 3) will enhance and integrate the PEMDAS Atmospheric Sensing and Prediction System (ASAPS®) to improve situational awareness on Government-selected manned and unmanned airframes. This sequential SBIR will conclude with delivery of a subset of the EI decision support products outlined in TO 1 in real time. The specific systems the prototype DMO-EI system will integrate will be determined based on availability of Navy/Marine Corps/Coast Guard assets.