Geo Tracking and Targeting
Written by William Murray
SOTECH 2012 Volume: 10 Issue: 1 (February)
With Global Positioning System (GPS) signals easy to jam by commercial products that one can purchase for $100 or less, there is clearly a need for the armed forces to go further. Department of Defense officials view geo-tracking and targeting technology as a means to better pinpoint a target or other item of interest, whether it is stationary or moving, for more accurate munitions delivery and avoidance of friendly fire incidents and civilian casualties.
One contractor pointed out that GPS signals are clearly insufficient for military field applications. “The adversaries of the United States are not limited by the $100 price barrier on the Internet,” so jamming a GPS signal would not present a big hurdle for them, said Kyle Rice, chief technology officer for the Intelligence Systems Business Unit at Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) in McLean, Va.
Using sources of location such as GPS and network signals such as IP addresses, RFID, Wi-Fi and CDMA and GSM cellular identifications, geo-location can provide location information for a device, which would typically include longitude and latitude data.
The DoD’s pain is clearly an opportunity for contractors. One of the largest growth areas for DoD contractors, according to one vendor, is quick reaction capability programs for ground surveillance and airborne surveillance. John Bradburn, senior business development director at SRI Sarnoff International Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif., called ground force protection the number two requirement within intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance programs in DoD.
DoD officials need early warning capabilities, surveillance and tracking programs, according to Bradburn. “These areas have become mission critical,” he said on the eve of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and its fortified position in Afghanistan. “We don’t see that going away anytime soon.”
He sees military personnel using personal digital assistants (PDAs) such as Androids and iPhones and tablet computers to access geo-tracking and targeting data. In some cases, military personnel use commercial versions of the PDAs and throw them away when they malfunction, while in other cases they might spend more money to purchase ruggedized versions, which will generally last longer during rough operational use.
SAIC’s Rice compared the GPS systems’ limited performance to a person being able to hear a telephone conversation from across a room in an otherwise deserted office building at 6 a.m. When there are terrain, structures, jammers and other factors that get in the way of a GPS signal, it becomes more like the office building during the work week at 10 a.m., where it is much harder to hear a phone conversation across the room because of additional noise, such as copier machines, coffee brewers, hallway and phone conversations, computers and fax machines.
“GPS can be very accurate,” Bradburn said, arguing that GPS systems do have a place in a military operational environment. “There are concerns in the community about viability,” he added. DoD officials are working at achieving “absolute reliability without reliance on GPS,” in geo-tracking and targeting, he said. “That’s a problem area and a challenge to create failsafe mechanisms that can’t be interdicted.”
“GPS is a good first step,” SAIC’s Rice said. Extreme location accuracy, a state that SAIC is trying to achieve with a commercial rail carrier in the Western U.S., is “much more precise,” he said. “With inertial measurement units, you can tell how segmented missiles are getting off track,” using beacons, Rice said. Contractors are helping U.S. Special Operations Command officials to geo-reference people, places, vehicles and other items of interest, tagging longitudinal and latitudinal data for each object of interest. With the right tools, military personnel can engage in persistent surveillance to monitor and track a potential target, which could include a person, place or vehicle, with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can also estimate the speed of travel for moving vehicles that are of interest.
At first, geolocation systems were developed under small business innovation research (SBIR) contracts, such as SOCOM’s testing of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s small, low-cost Wolfpack geolocation system under a contract with Information Systems Laboratories Inc., of Vienna, Va., and subcontractor Raytheon. At that time, there was a geolocation accuracy of 10 meters for munitions targeting, but SOCOM officials wanted to improve upon this performance.
In recent years, a commercial industry has sprung up around the use of geolocation with GPS technology, taking the technology well beyond the realm of SBIR contracts.
For example, SAIC has developed the GeoRover geospatial software products, which are extensions or plug-ins to the Arc- Map component of Esri ArcGIS Desktop GIS software versions 8.x, 9.x and 10. Through its import wizard, GeoRover can take in non-spatial data with coordinates from different sources, such as databases, spreadsheets and text in many formats into ArcGIS. Operators can plot routes and collect field data as layers in Arc- GIS. Users can collect field data, furthermore, with commercial GPS receivers and other components, such as digital cameras and voice recorders.
In 2006, SAIC acquired Geo-Spatial Technologies Inc. (GSTI), a Springfield, Va.- and Seattle, Wash.-based company that reserved, developed and applied novel geospatial technology for advanced 3-D imaging, reconnaissance, remote sensing and mapping systems. GSTI had developed systems applying airborne, vehicle-based and terrestrial sensors for mapping urban terrain and structures using light detection and ranging, interferometric synthetic aperture radar, digital cameras and video.
There’s a clear blue forces tracking benefit to knowing where friendly forces are to ensure that they don’t receive friendly fire. According to Bradburn, the ability for the Special Operations Command and other DoD users to employ video surveillance for change detection in carrying out surveillance on an object of interest is an important capability. Geolocation and targeting systems can greatly help with munitions accuracy, he said, as well as better help forces interdict hostile movements toward them.
“You can identify better what you want to do” using geolocation and targeting systems, said Mark Hutcheson, business development manager at Optical Alchemy Inc. of Nashua, N.H.
Founded in 2001, Optical Alchemy designs and manufactures ultra-lightweight, geo-referenced, inertially stabilized sensors for manned and unmanned systems. Optical Alchemy sells inertiallystabilized, geo-referenced gimbals with electro-optical/infrared imaging designed to enable greatly improving situational awareness, force protection, and target acquisition capability. In the case of UAVs, Optical Alchemy’s package improves fuel economy, which can expand mission ranges and duration.
Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) with a spectral camera in a UAV allows military personnel to identify shades of color, which makes a big difference, according to Hutcheson. While the human eye sees colors in three bands, HSI divides the spectrum into many more bands. HSI has the ability to collect and process information from across the electromagnetic spectrum to include bands that are beyond the visible realm.
“Color is very unique,” Hutcheson said. “The camouflage color difference between the U.S. and Russian army is an example” of differences in colors that hyperspectral imaging could capture. “As you’re looking at a scene, you can identify that shade much easier, with the materials … flagged,” using hyperspectral imaging, Hutcheson said.
Three-dimensional hyperspectral imaging is a game-changing technology because through spectral cameras, it gives military personnel the ability to identify the same object over time without having to constantly monitor it, according to Hutcheson. Some operators use binoculars to look at 3-D hyperspectral images. Pattern of life analyses through geo-monitoring allow operators to follow targets over very long timeframes, which can help with improvised explosive device searches or the extensive hunt by Navy SEALs that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011.
One of the benefits of hyperspectral imagery and surveillance in a SOCOM context is that hyperspectral surveillance draws information from such a large portion of the light spectrum that any given object should have a unique spectral signature in at least a few of the many bands that are scanned.
Geo-referencing, the ability to define an object’s existence in physical space—in map projections or coordinated systems— has advanced greatly over the last five to 10 years, according to Hutcheson. “With some systems, we don’t know exactly where we’re looking, but we will know to ‘just look to the left,’ which is helpful information,” he said. Georeferencing is crucial to making aerial and satellite imagery, usually raster images, capable for mapping as it explains how other data, such as GPS points, relate to the imagery.
“With geo-referencing, we can see exactly where something is. We can then send the coordinates with much more accuracy,” to operators in the field, who can mark the location of the object of interest on a database or map, Hutcheson said. Great accuracy can help improve munitions delivery and decrease the likelihood of civilian casualties and blue-on-blue friendly fire incidents because air power can more accurately identify targets with the aid of operators in the field and hyperspectral imaging run through UAV sensors.
The emerging technology is enticing and holds great promise, but there are fallacies to its use. For example, military personnel in theater need to be careful about inadvertently providing geo-tracking and targeting information on their position to the enemy, through geo-tagging features on Facebook, Flickr and other social networking sites or through cell phone transmissions, since an enemy combatant could find these transmissions if he were looking to intercept them. For this reason, some contractors advise DoD operators to operate PDAs when they are collecting geolocation and targeting data in an unplugged environment.
According to SRI International Sarnoff’s Bradburn, “encryption in many cases is required” for the end-user. “We have to make sure our communications are secure.” His company provides support to all DoD services and lists the Army as its largest customer.
“Direction and space of hostile movement toward them is what an operator is interested in,” Bradburn said. “What people are interested in is what the threat is and what direction is it headed.”
SRI International is a nonprofit research institute that performs research and development for government agencies, commercial businesses and private foundations. In addition to conducting contract R&D, SRI International licenses its technologies, forms strategic partnerships and creates spin-off companies.
Fixed wing UAVs, known for their adaptability to adverse weather, enhanced fuel efficiency, and shorter learning curve for the untrained operator, are preferred by many DoD operators over rotary wing aircraft or blimps for geo-tracking. Fixed wing UAVs also have shown durability in harsh environments. Fixed wing UAVs, moreover, can provide images from multiple vantage points, allowing for more robust localization.
Another key DoD vendor in geo location and targeting is Lockheed Martin (LM) Space Systems Co., which provides program management, systems engineering and spacecraft development under its Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) contract with the Air Force Infrared Space Systems Directorate at the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif. SBIRS is considered a high-priority space program.
LM Space Systems Co. provides program management, systems engineering and spacecraft development, while LM Integrated Systems and Solutions is the ground systems developer and supports systems engineering. Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, meanwhile, is the payload subcontractor and supports systems engineering and ground mission processing development.
The SBIRS program consists of two geosynchronous Earth orbit satellites, two highly elliptical orbit payloads riding on host satellites, and associated worldwide deployed ground systems. The Air Force may procure a third satellite later. ♦