Novel Sensing and Detection

The Low Cost Thermal Imager - Manufacturing (LCTI-M) program seeks to enable widespread use of infrared imaging (IR) technology by individual warfighters, with a special focus on affordability and ease of use for dismounted soldiers and individual intelligence personnel, for whom situational awareness and instant sharing of information is critical. IR imaging has the capability to “see” through obscurants, providing valuable information even in environments with severely degraded visibility. Low-cost infrared cameras would empower each warfighter with this essential capability and could open the way to new tactical procedures that demand a common view of the battlefield.

The Military Imaging and Surveillance Technology (MIST) program will develop a fundamentally new optical ISR capability that can provide high-resolution 3-D images to locate and identify a target at much longer ranges than is possible with existing optical systems.

Free-space optics today requires a telescope, bulk lasers with mechanical beam-steering, detectors, and electronics. The Modular Optical Aperture Building Blocks (MOABB) program seeks to design all of these components into a single integrated device. In what would be deemed as the most complex electronic-photonic circuit ever fashioned, the program’s performers will work to create a wafer-scale system that is 100x smaller and lighter than conventional systems and can steer the optical beam 1,000x faster than mechanical components.

The warfighter's effectiveness in current and future combat missions can be severely limited by inadequate target discrimination, and an inability to view the operational scene with larger fields of view and longer standoff distances. For ground combat and near-ground support operations where tactical information is urgently needed to make timely decisions, there is a significant capability gap for day and night intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).

U.S. forces are often immersed in a highly complex, rapidly evolving, hostile environment containing a diverse collection of potential threats. Despite significant recent advances in both the platforms (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles) and the sensor payloads (e.g., very high resolution cameras) employed within the wide array of modern Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, these conventional solutions do not currently provide the spatial, temporal or functional capabilities required by the individual warfighter.