The A160 Hummingbird systems that are being deployed to Afghanistan in May 2012 will take advantage of the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Imaging System.
Test flights will be carried out in Arizona at the start of the year before they are shipped to the Middle East. The Argus-IS’s acronym was chosen to recall Argus Panoptes – the one-hundred-eyed-giant of Greek mythology. The technology is based on a 1.8 gigapixel camera – the largest video sensor used in tactical missions.
The Argus-IS system offers the army wider fields of view than had been possible using earlier equipment. It offers 900 times the resolution of the 2 megapixel camera found in some mobile phones. The system can provide real-time video streams at the rate of 10 frames a second.
The army said that was enough to track people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet (6.1km) across almost 65 square miles (168 sq km).
In addition, operators on the ground can select up to 65 steerable “windows” following separate targets to be “stared at”. Vehicles, people and other objects can be tracked even if they move in different directions.
“If you have a bunch of people leaving a place at the same time, they no longer have to say, ‘Do I follow vehicle one, two, three or four,'” said program manager Brian Leninger ahead of the system’s launch. “They can say: ‘I will follow all of them, simultaneously and automatically.'”
The equipment has had new antennas attached to it to optimise its performance on the new aircraft.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is also working with the UK-based defence contractor BAE Systems to develop a more advanced version of the Argus-IS sensor that will offer night vision.
It said the infrared imaging sensors would be sensitive enough to follow “dismounted personnel at night”.
In addition, the upgrade promises to be able to follow up to 130 “windows” at the same time.
Sources: BBC, The Register