February 3, 2021 | International, C4ISR

With Deepwave Digital, Northrop Grumman is pushing processing to the edge

WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman says a new investment into small startup Deepwave Digital will allow it to push data processing much closer to the point of collection, decreasing the amount of data that needs to be transported and getting products to war fighters faster.

Northrop Grumman will install Deepwave Digital's artificial intelligence solution on airborne and on orbit payloads, said Chris Daughters, the company's vice president of research, technology and engineering for aeronautics systems. With the AI incorporated into the payload, the satellite or aircraft will no longer need to send data back to the ground to be processed. Instead, the payload will process the data itself.

The innovation, said Daughters, is in incorporating the AI software with the hardware used in various Northrop Grumman payloads.

“Deepwave Digital really has an innovative architecture that blends artificial intelligence with some advanced hardware in the RF [radio frequency] domain, whereas a lot of artificial intelligence in the past has always been focused on, I'll just say, mining and scrubbing really big data or maybe doing customized things with video or audio,” said Daughters.

In other words, the AI is able to process data at the edge, at the point of collection, instead of sending it down to Earth to be processed independently.

“We have a lot of RF payload systems that collect information or collect intelligence for the war fighters and the government as a whole, and by embedding this innovative hardware and AI software, we are able to essentially filter and optimize and scrub and prioritize the data much nearer to the point of collection for that information,” said Daughters.

AI has been key to the military's efforts to manage the torrent of data collected by government and commercial satellites, which is simply too much for human analysts to sort through on their own. While progress has been made in using AI to process satellite imagery, military officials are now tackling a related problem: the sheer amount of raw data being pushed out over the networks for processing at remote locations. To reduce the bandwidth needed for satellite imagery, U.S. Army officials say the military needs to shift to edge processing, meaning applying AI to the data and then sending the finished product out over the network instead of all of the raw data.

“Edge processing is something that we're very interested in for a number of reasons. And what I mean by that is having smart sensors that can not only detect the enemy, [but] identify, characterize and locate, and do all those tasks at the sensor processing,” said John Strycula, director of the Army's task force focused on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, at an October AUSA event.

“If I only have to send back a simple message from the sensor that says the target is here ― here's the location and here's what I saw and here's my percent confidence ― versus sending back the whole image across the network, it reduces those bandwidth requirements,” he added.

Daughters said Northrop Grumman is working to incorporate Deepwave Digital's AI solution into products in development or in limited production in the “very near term.”

“The capability exists now. We just need to integrate it in with the systems,” said Daughters. “Our research and technology organization is already looking at how we could be injecting this hardware and AI capability in some of the systems that exist right now or very near term.”

While the company is applying the AI to both space and airborne systems, the technology can be more easily integrated with airborne systems, where payloads can be more easily accessed or swapped out.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/2021/02/02/with-deepwave-digital-northrop-grumman-is-pushing-processing-to-the-edge/

On the same subject

December 7, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

Organizers Cancel Paris Air Show 2021 On COVID-19 Uncertainty
Helen Massy-Beresford December 07, 2020 PARIS—The organizers of the Paris Air Show, the world's largest, have canceled the 2021 edition because of continued uncertainty related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The board of directors of the Paris Air Show and the board of directors of French aerospace industry association GIFAS made the decision unanimously, describing it as inevitable in a statement Dec. 7. “This reasonable decision was agreed upon unanimously by the Paris Air Show board members in the context of a crisis that has had an unprecedented impact on the aerospace industry,” they said in a joint statement. The coronavirus crisis has devasted demand for travel, with many airlines grounding the majority of their fleets and relying on government bailouts to survive. IATA does not expect traffic to return to 2019 levels before 2024. The Paris Air Show is usually held at Le Bourget Airport, just outside the French capital, and in 2019 attracted over 316,000 visitors, split between civil and defense industry professionals and the general public, making it the largest air show in the world. Orders worth $140 billion—across the civil and military sectors—were announced at the 2019 show. The first Paris Air Show was held in 1909 and the event has taken place every other year since—with interruptions for the two world wars. The 2021 edition was set to be the 54th. “We are obviously disappointed not to be able to hold the 2021 edition of the Paris Air Show. After many months of all trade show activities being suspended throughout the world, the entire international aerospace and defence community was very much looking forward to being able to meet,” the International Paris Air Show chairman and Daher Group chairman Patrick Daher said. “We have already started work to ensure that the 2023 edition celebrates the resurgence of the aerospace industry on an international scale,” he added. The event had been due to take place from June 21-27 next year and the organizers said they would shortly announce the exact dates of the next edition, which will be held in June 2023. https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/aircraft-propulsion/organizers-cancel-paris-air-show-2021-covid-19-uncertainty
December 10, 2019 | International, Naval

Acting US Navy secretary: Deliver me a 355-ship fleet by 2030
By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — Acting U.S. Navy Secretary Thomas Modly in public comments and in a directive to the force has mandated that the service find a path to quickly get to 355 ships. Despite some soft-pedaling from Navy leadership on the 355-ship goal, Modly has made it clear that such an inventory is national policy and that he wants leadership to get behind it. “[Three hundred and fifty-five ships] is stated as national policy,” Modly told an audience at the USNI Defense Forum on Dec. 5. “It was also the president's goal during the election. We have a goal of 355, we don't have a plan for 355. We need to have a plan, and if it's not 355, what's it going to be and what's it going to look like?” In a memo released Thursday to the force, Modly said he wanted an actionable plan by the end of the 2020s. In the memo, Modly called for the services to develop “an integrated plan to achieve ... 355 ships (or more) unmanned underwater vehicles, and unmanned surface vehicles for greater naval power within 10 years.” The push toward the 355-ship fleet, which kicked off after a 2016 force-structure assessment, has been on shaky ground of late, with former Navy Secretary Richard Spencer calling it “aspirational.” Last year, the service's former top requirements officer told an audience at the Navy's largest annual conference that people should focus more on capabilities and less on the number. The issue is that the Navy is required by law to pursue a 355-ship Navy, something that was the focus of House and Senate lawmakers early on in the Trump administration. The fleet currently stands at 292 ships. During his comments at the USNI Defense Forum, Modly said that if the Navy must fight the other services for money to achieve that goal, then that's what it should do. “We ought to be lobbying for that and making a case for it and arguing in the halls of the Pentagon for a bigger share of the budget if that's what is required,” Modly said. “But we have to come to a very clear determination as to what [355 ships] means, and all the equipment we need to support that. “How many more hypersonics are we going to need? Where are we going to put them? These are long-term investments that we will have to make, but we have to get our story straight first. So I'm going to focus a lot on that this year.” Modly's comments and his Dec. 6 directive got a boost from President Donald Trump's national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, the following day at the Reagan National Defense Forum. O'Brien told the audience there that Trump meant business when he called for a larger Navy during the 2016 campaign. “When President Trump says a 350-ship Navy, he means a 350-ship Navy, and not decades from now,” O'Brien said. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/12/09/acting-us-navy-secretary-deliver-me-a-355-ship-fleet-by-2030/
May 8, 2020 | International, Aerospace

Podcast: International Fighter Competitions
Jen DiMascio Tony Osborne Steve Trimble On the heels of Germany's proposal to purchase both Eurofighter Typhoons and Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets, Aviation Week editors Jen DiMascio, Tony Osborne and Steve Trimble discuss ongoing fighter competitions around the world on Check 6, highlighting one of the most dynamic markets in aerospace. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/podcast-international-fighter-competitions

All news