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15 Dr Donough Wilson Dr Wilson is innovation lead at aviation, defence, and homeland security innovation consultants, VIVID/futureVision. His defence innovations include the cockpit vision system that protects military aircrew from asymmetric high-energy laser attack. He was first to propose the automatic tracking and satellite download of airliner black box and cockpit voice recorder data in the event of an airliner’s unplanned excursion from its assigned flight level or track. For his ‘outstanding and practical contribution to the safer operation of aircraft’ he was awarded The Sir James Martin Award 2018/19, by the Honourable Company of Air Pilots. Paul Weighell Paul has been involved with electronics, computer design and programming since 1966. He has worked in the real-time and failsafe data acquisition and automation industry using mainframes, minis, micros and cloud-based hardware on applications as diverse as defence, Siberian gas pipeline control, UK nuclear power, robotics, the Thames Barrier, Formula One and automated financial trading systems. Ian Williams-Wynn Ian has been involved with unmanned and autonomous systems for more than 20 years. He started his career in the military, working with early prototype unmanned systems and exploiting imagery from a range of unmanned systems from global suppliers. He has also been involved in ground-breaking research including novel power and propulsion systems, sensor technologies, communications, avionics and physical platforms. His experience covers a broad spectrum of domains from space, air, maritime and ground, and in both defence and civil applications including, more recently, connected autonomous cars. Unmanned Systems Technology’s consultants Delta Digital Video (DDV) has supplied its rugged Model 6820R two-channel HD/ SD video encoder to General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. It was integrated into the unmanned SkyGuardian aircraft before its successful test flight across the Atlantic Ocean (writes Rory Jackson). “Like all our products, the 6820R H.264 video encoder is designed in accordance with a range of standards, particularly regarding full-motion video, KLV metadata, and transport protocols, as defined by the US Motion Imagery Standards Board [MISB],” said George Nelson, vice-president of DDV. The 6820R is the company’s first dual-channel encoder. It uses a high- performance system-on-chip with H.264 video compression to provide simultaneous EO/IR downlinks, which helped with the SkyGuardian’s take-off and landing. “The variety of sensor environments and configurations on such platforms, including IR, high-zoom and low- light, create challenges for video compression,” added DDV’s chief engineer Steve Schaphorst. “Meeting the dynamic bandwidth constraints, along with synchronising the metadata and imagery, were critical objectives of the integration process.” MISB standards for interoperability define much of how the integration is carried out. For example, it includes the multiplexing and synchronising of video data with metadata into packets to be carried simultaneously from the UAV to its GCS via MPEG-2 transport streams. In the case of the SkyGuardian, other work had to be done to enable the 6820R to communicate with legacy interfaces typical of many US government and military data links, as the encoder was designed to work with Ethernet links. Military standards critical to the development requirements of the 6820R include Mil-Std-810 for environmental ruggedness, Mil-Std-461 for EMI safety and Mil-Std-704 for operating with aircraft power. “Environmental and EMI impacts are mitigated by paying careful attention to best electrical and mechanical engineering practices,” Nelson added. General uptake for video encoder Airborne vehicles Unmanned Systems Technology | December/January 2019 Delta Digital Video’s rugged 6820R has been integrated into the Skyhawk (Courtesy of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems)