Triton Systems, Inc., in partnership with Vanderbilt University, will design, build, and test the Triton Sensor for Autonomous Identification and Location of Opposing Resistance (SAILOR), a hostile fire indicator mountable to Group 1 unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and self-guiding target munitions. The Triton SAILOR uses a combination of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) optoelectronic components, CMOS fabrication-compatible metalenses, and robust hostile fire detection algorithms to reduce the size, weight, and power (SWAP) and cost compared to state-of-the-art systems. By having the unique ability to be deployed on smaller payload UAVs, the Triton SAILOR allows warfighters to locate enemy threats more readily and counter them more effectively.
Benefit: Hostile fire indicators must meet many requirements to capture hostile fire events: high sensitivity to collect enough light from small arms fire up to 1, 500 m away, high-speed operation above 1, 000 frames per second to capture the full temporal profile of the muzzle flash that lasts just a few milliseconds, and operation in a waveband that has a large available signal and low background clutter. Moreover, for mounting on Group 1 UAVs, the hostile fire indicators must also have low SWAP and low cost. The Triton SAILOR meets all the requirements by capturing hostile fire events in a high-speed manner using COTS optoelectronic components and CMOS-compatible metalenses, which dramatically reduces the SWAP and cost.
Keywords: metalens, metalens, Sensor, geolocation, SWAP, UAV, algorithm, Probability of detection, Hostile Fire Indicator
