80 systems with very limited integration space. It is flange-mounted and has swappable power modules for supporting a variety of power inputs, from 48 V DC to 270 V AC. It is currently available in PCIe Gen 4, and will be available in PCIe Gen 5 later this year. Lastly, the company exhibited its Rigel Edge Supercomputer, which it said is the highest performance-to-weight computer commercially available. The system features a GPU with a form factor called SXM, which is similar to the form factor of Nvidia’s PCIe GPUs such as the A100 but uses a P2P bus called Nvidia NVLink, which is 3-5x faster than PCIe. “SXM is typically meant for data centres, and Nvidia and other companies sell SXM solutions as part of the DGX platform,” Mannik said. “We took the guts of DGX, shrunk it in half, and ruggedised it for an edge environment to Mil-Std 810G. “That makes the Rigel half the size of systems of comparable power in data centres, and applicable to autonomous systems that need a huge amount of computing power.” Rigel is Nvidia-certified, weighs 22.68 kg and integrates four A100 SXM GPUs for up to 24 Tbyte/s of total bandwidth, 320 Gbytes of GPU memory, an AMD EPYC 7003 CPU, and up to eight ECC DDR4 RDIMM/LRDIMM cards (with up to 128 Gbytes each). Although C-Astral is best known as a UAV manufacturer and systems integrator, for the past 5 years it has been covertly developing a digital data link, and disclosed details of it at the show to us. “Historically we’ve been radioagnostic – we integrate Silvus, Trellisware, Microhard, Commtact, you name it. But we’ve also specialised in RF-related activities like antenna design, analogue link design, shielding and link optimisation, and through that saw a need for a robust, tailor made and cost-effective digital data link,” explained Marko Peljhan. “The first 30 units are shipping to experimental clients – mainly research organisations who we expect will give good, detailed feedback, one of which is also the Netherlands MoD.” The products are to be marketed under the ASTRAL-DYNAMIK trademark and under the Dyn Series of radios, with DYN23L and -S to be the first variants in that product line, both of these weighing 85 g and consuming up to 8 W. They transmit securely over the L and S bands respectively, and although it is not designed to frequency-hop, they use a proprietary and highly customisable protocol that can be adapted for complex purposes. One user has tailored it for connecting mobile LTE base stations, and the system can be used for point-to-multipoint and mesh networking with packet prioritisation (an uncommon feature among other radio manufacturers). “Packet prioritisation means that in very challenging RF environments – even jammed or other conflicted electromagnetic spaces – it reconfigures itself to get prioritised packets through first, such as the C2-specific packets or mission-critical intelligence data,” Peljhan said. The company has also developed a modular ground control station architecture, which can contain an array of different links including C-Astral’s own new proprietary system just discussed. “Also, our SQA eVTOL UAV is now in full production, with 50 units already manufactured, production capacity filled, and we’re now implementing new sensor packages to really flesh out its multi-role capability,” Peljhan added. “It’s generated some good interest from first responders, law enforcement, the military and our more usual commercial clients seeking a more robust, capable and professional solution than their previous DJI-type systems.” Honeywell exhibited a newGCS it calls its Ground Control System, which is aimed at providing a middle ground between large containerised GCSs and small handheld tablet devices. “As more professional delivery and inspection vehicles become typecertified, there will be mounting expectations that GCSs will conform to a similar level of standards to ensure robust command, control, monitoring or supervision of multiple vehicles at a time,” said Sapan Shah. “We’ve therefore designed this GCS to be certifiable, and although it will initially be configured for one vehicle per supervisor, it will be scalable to support many vehicles per supervisor over time.” The GCS is a three-monitor desktop solution. At Xponential, one screen featured the state of vehicle subsystems such as the SoC of a UAV’s battery and the operating state of motors, comms, June/July 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Honeywell’s new GCS, with all three screens visible
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mzk4