See first is key in defeating an incoming threat. In the past, armoured vehicles were mostly equipped to see at medium-long range, however with urban scenarios becoming increasingly common, short-range situational awareness (SA) systems are now standard issue on most platforms. All those sensors, mostly optronic, are designed to pick up potential land-based threats. The advent of First Person View (FPV) drones and loitering munitions increase the need for overhead SA, Maris-Tech of Israel introducing its Uranus Ultra, an edge computing platform providing land-based systems with a 360° and 3-D video situational awareness and airborne threat analog
A global leader in video and artificial intelligence (AI)-based edge computing technology, in late 2024 Maris-Tech announced the completion of its Uranus-Drones miniature, lightweight, and low-power allowing providing air vehicles with tracking, detection, and real-time data collection capabilities without the need for additional accessories as it enables a direct connection to the camera and full control over its capabilities. “We are in the grams scale of mass,” Israel Bar, the company Chief Executive Officer, told EDR On-Line, adding that the company has provided tens of thousands of systems currently in use on numerous types of platforms, from mini-UAVs to satellites.
“We have also developed situational awareness platforms for land-based systems such as armoured vehicles and other, as well as intelligence gathering platforms capable to provide automated intelligence from remote and unmanned sites,” the company CEO adds. “The lessons learned from Ukraine and Israel conflicts, with the appearance of new threats coming from the sky, led Maris-Tech to look also upwards to provide the capability to detect day and night incoming projectiles.”
The Uranus Ultra is a computer board that hosts all the hardware and software needed to provide the 360° 3-D SA, the board being designed and manufactured by the Rehovot-based company. The available computing power is at the core of the system, which is based on a Rockchip Electronics RK3588 low power, high performance system-on-a-chipprocessor that integrates an octa-core central processing unit comprising a quad-core Cortex-A76 and a quad-core Cortex-A55, the graphic processing unit being a quad-core ARM Mali-G610 MP4. The Neural Processing Unit power allows up to 6 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second), however the Uranus Ultra is also fitted with a dual Hailo-8 AI accelerators that boost its capacity up to 60 TOPS.
“We are used to reduce as much as possible dimensions, mass and power, hence out Uranus Ultra has a consumption of around 10 W, less than half that of our competitors,” Israel Bar explains, adding that cooling is totally passive, no fans being needed.
All this allows the Maris-Tech system to take in video images from multiple optronic sensors, merge all information, analyse them without the need to send them to an upper-level analysis centre, providing real-time SA as well as near-real-time decision-making suggestions to the platform commander, a life-saving capacity in mission critical environments.
Switching from nerd jargon into more practical issues, the Uranus Ultra is equipped with 12 SD/HD camera inputs; three of them are analog, the Composite Video Blanking Sync (CVBS) cameras providing PAL/NTSC signals and are used to acquire signals from thermal imaging cameras, while all remaining inputs are digital. We find five video inputs for Power-over-Ethernet (POE) Internet Protocol (IP) cameras, three for High-Definition Serial Digital Interface (HD-SDI) cameras, to which we must add one HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) input.
Of course, cameras are pointed not only around the vehicle but also cover the overhead space, allowing full coverage in the three-dimensional domain with images up to 8K with ultra-low latency, the latter being another vital data for increasing tracking accuracy. A 64 GB embedded Multi-Media Card (eMMC) and a 8 GB RAM Low-Power Double Data Rate (LPDDR) provide the memory capacity needed for real-time processing, AI ensuring real-time analytics and decision-making capabilities.
The Uranus Ultra ensures continuous recording, which enables post-action debriefing as well as a continuous improving of the AI model, which is fed by real world data. RAW (Raw Audiovisual Workflow) video is recorded, which contain all information before compression, allowing therefore maximum exploitation. “Information coming from the battlefield is usually classified, hence we do not get it at the company. What we provide to our customers is the capability to record it and to download it, using the 2 TB Micro-SD, to be then processed by their specialists and to improve the deep learning of the system,” the CEO explains. Intelligence specialists will investigate threats that were not automatically detected in real time, adding those to the data base to improve the system performances against new types of threats. EDR On-Line understood that at leas partial upgrades might be shared with the company to provide improvements also to the standard version available.
The Uranus Ultra has two video output, one analog and one digital. A fully passive system, the Maris-Tech platform provides identification and position data about incoming threats, which are then fed into the vehicle Battle Management System, that will propose to the operator the course of action, for example the use of either a soft-kill or a hard-kill solution to neutralise the threat.
EDR On-Line understood that the Uranus Ultra in the 360° SA version is already in full use with at least one customer, the new 3-D capacity becoming available now.