Date: Mar 01, 2008 Source: ARMY SBIR Success Story (
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Explosive Ordnance Disposal Soldiers remotely operate robots to disarm explosive ordnance from safe distances. Maintaining good situational awareness and effectiveness is extremely difficult. Soldiers operating at night are often restricted by having to stop completely before looking left
or right.
Chatten Associates, Inc. created a low cost Head-Aimed Remote Viewer (HARV), which more than doubles the mission performance of remote operations. The HARV lets remote operators look around as though they were sitting on the robot. Wherever the operator looks, the camera HARV can be controlled by either a joystick or an operator's head motions.
The HARV provides excellent visual options: during the day, operators see the scene in full color; at night, the gimbal carries either an ultra-low-light camera, which can operate in most night conditions without illumination, or a thermal imager. The gimbal has both infrared and white light illuminators to be used when needed as well as visible and infrared laser pointers, and stereo audio microphones. For armored and up-armored vehicles, a HARV lets a completely enclosed crewmember look around as though his head was out of the hatch. The HARV's thermal imager looks left, right, and straight ahead all in perfect sync with the driver's head motions.
The HARV is especially valuable to Soldiers as it enables them to recover the situational awareness lost when they operate closed-hatch with a remote weapons station. Currently, Army researchers are evaluating the effectiveness of the HARV by having EOD and Special Operations Command (SOCOM) troops in Iraq and Afghanistan test its capabilities.
Phase III Impacts:
Chatten Associates secured $664K from the SBIR Commercialization Pilot Program. Less than two years from the start date of SBIR Phase II, HARV sales the Army and its Prime Contractors; SOCOM; Idaho National Laboratory; Foster Miller; John Deere; and others have amounted to over $500K.
