DVD 2022

18 October 2022
DVD 2022

I recently attended the much-anticipated DVD 2022 at UTAC Millbrook in the UK. DVD is an established Defence industry exhibition focussed on Land Equipment (and sponsored by Defence Equipment & Support (Land) organisation and Army HQ) with the aim to ease and enable engagement between UK Army staff, DE&S Delivery Teams, suppliers and other ecosystem members within the Defence industry, to support the challenges that the MOD teams face when equipping and supporting the UK’s Armed Forces now and in the future.

The theme this year was ‘Mobilise and Modernise – A Decade of Delivery’, and at its core, how to deliver on equipment programmes, modernise support, and exploit future technology, and lay some foundations for the UK MoD Land Industrial Strategy (LIS) to foster greater collaboration between MoD and Industry. So, it was an excellent opportunity to showcase current and emerging technologies to many major stakeholders within the Land Defence community, and AMETEK Abaco Systems had no hesitation in attending and exhibiting.

As expected, the show was well attended and there were some excellent quality conference presentations and discussions, most notably “Leveraging Civilian Technologies to Accelerate Digital Transformation” and “Enabling the Digital Backbone”.

In the Abaco booth, our GVC1001 and ImageFlex software was executing an artificial intelligence (AI) and object detection from a live camera feed, and it generated significant attention with passers-by who stopped to pose and interact with the real-time demonstration. AI and deep learning certainly are rapidly emerging technologies in defence applications and can be deployed in many applications from target recognition to 360° situational awareness, autonomous sensor fusion, EO/IR processing, degraded visual environment (DVE), and many more.

The GVC1001 is a high-performance AI and display computer featuring the Nvidia® Jetson™ AGX Xavier™ GPU for video and image processing applications at the battlespace edge that require operation in rugged environments with minimal size, weight and power (SWaP).

With ever faster evolving technologies and associated threats utilising those same technologies, security was of course a hot topic in the booth. Security is, of course, of extremely high importance to the MoD, and many Abaco products address the challenges faced in the land-based theatre of operations.

Our latest Intel based processing products provide the basic building blocks for implementation of security (e.g. TPM) whilst augmenting that with a flexible platform for users to realise custom security requirements e.g. in FPGA. This combined with Abaco’s expertise in deploying rugged solutions into real-world ground applications enables us to be provide and support leading edge technologies throughout the land domain.

 

Tim Owen

Tim is a field applications engineer based out of Abaco’s Towcester office and supporting customers throughout Europe. Before joining Abaco in January 2019, he held a similar role with Wind River, and also spent three years with Mercury Computer Systems. He graduated from the University of Westminster with a degree in Electronic Engineering: DSP and Communications. In his spare time, Tim organises and coaches youth football.