Practical Electro-Optical Situational Awareness For Armored Vehicles

By Andy Preece, application lead, GE Intelligent Platforms

Choosing the appropriate situational awareness system means navigating complexities such as sensor types, mounting locations, video distribution, and more.

There is growing interest in deploying situational awareness (SA) capability onboard armored vehicles as they are deployed in situations of greater threat, putting crew lives at even greater risk. The primary function of an electro-optical SA system is to provide a constant stream of live video data to the vehicle crew from video sensors mounted on the outside of the vehicle, so that the outside world can be viewed from the relative safety of the vehicle. Achieving this may sound like a relatively simple task, but choosing from the array of different sensor types, sensor mount locations, video compositing, and display systems is a complicated matter.