Michael A. Helgeson

Enhanced situational technologies applied to ship channels

The Houston Ship Channel ranks as Americas number one port in foreign tonnage by welcoming more than 50,000 cargo ships and barges annually. Locally 196,000 jobs, 5.5 billion dollars in business revenue and 213 million dollars in taxes are generated. Unfortunately, 32 days of each year vessel traffic stops for hours due to fog causing an estimated 40- 100 million dollars loss as ships idly wait in the channel for weather to clear. In addition, poor visibility has contributed to past vessel collisions which have resulted in channel closure, and associated damage to property and the environment. Todays imaging technology for synthetic vision systems and enhanced situational awareness systems offers a new solution to this problem. Whereas, typically these systems have been targeted at aircraft landing systems the channel navigation application provides a peripheral ground based market. This paper describes two imaging solutions to the problem. One using an active 35 GHz scanning radar and the other using a 94 GHz passive millimeter wave camera.

High-resolution color flat panel head-mounted display design for the Advanced Flat Panel program

The Advanced Flat Panel program is developing high resolution color head mounted display systems for medical and low power applications. The first phase of the program has developed a stereoscopic head-mounted display for arthroscopic and endoscopic surgical applications using high resolution color AMLCDs and 1280 by 1024 spatially colored active matrix electroluminescent image sources. The next phase of the program will target low power color HMD applications with sequentially colored 1280 by 1024 AMEL devices and conclude with the demonstration of a 2560 by 2048 flat panel HMD. The medical HMD design and preliminary user evaluation of the system are discussed here along with a review of the spatially colored AMEL performance and a comparison of system architectures of the three different high resolution color displays that are being demonstrated on this program.

High-resolution flat-panel head-mounted display: results and conclusions from the combat vehicle crew head-mounted display

The Combat Vehicle Crew (CVC) head-mounted display (HMD) program has built the first high-resolution (1280 X 1024) flat panel head mounted display. The CVC HMD is designed for use by the tank commander of an M1 A2 main battle tank and will show both tactical IVIS information and thermal imagery from the commanders independent thermal viewer. The CVC HMD uses 1280 X 1024 active matrix electroluminescent image sources with 24 micrometers pixels and integrated digital drivers. The use of flat panels in the HMD design has allowed new optical and head integration approaches and has required new approaches to the HMD drive electronics. The integration of the first AMEL image sources has been completed and preliminary photometric and subjective image quality evaluations performed. The preliminary findings from these evaluations will be discussed and conclusions regarding the application of flat-panel HMDs presented.

Real-time radar signal processing for autonomous aircraft landing

Landing in poor weather is a crucial problem for the air transportation system. To aid the pilots for these conditions several solutions have been suggested and/or implemented including instrument landing systems (ILS) and microwave landing systems (MLS) that put the responsibility of the landing to a large extent in the hands of the airport facilities. These systems even though useful are not available due to their high costs even in a few major metropolitan airports. This shortcoming has generated interest in providing all weather capabilities not on the landing facility but on the vehicle itself. The Synthetic Vision System Technology Demonstration sponsored by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. Air Force represents an effort to respond to the above needs. In this paper we present a summary of a typical synthetic vision system. This system consists of a scanning 35 GHz radar, a scanning antenna, a signal/image processor and a head up display (HUD). The pilot is presented a final perspective image of the scene sensed by the radar with associated flight guidance symbology. This system is implemented in real time hardware and has been undergoing tower and flight testing under a variety of weather conditions since early 1992.