SAR - Long range SAR for Australia - UAS Vision

Australian Maritime Safety Authority Selects ViDAR for Search and Rescue

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) four new Challenger 604 jet search and rescue aircraft which begin to enter service in August 2016 will have an unprecedented ability to visually detect and track objects and people in the water, thanks to prime contractor Cobham Aviation Services’ selection of Sentient Vision’s Kestrel Maritime ViDAR (Visual Detection and Ranging) system as part of the program’s sensor suite.

Kestrel Maritime ViDAR consists of a 9-megapixel optical sensor and on-board software that automatically detects and highlights sea surface objects invisible to the naked eye in real time. In tests with the US Coast Guard in 2014 the ViDAR system detected small boats at ranges in excess of 20nm that were optically invisible to the sensor operators. Each Challenger 604 will mount three fixed ViDAR sensors and an integrated processing system to cue the primary Wescam MX-15 sensor to detected objects.

Cobham Business Development Director Anthony Patterson commented. “The real benefit we see in ViDAR is the ability to maintain a consistent quality visual search that has the same probability of detection in the first hour through to the last hour of an eight hour mission. Visual searching with the human eye is very fatiguing and diminishes over time as crew fatigue. This is the first product that offers the potential to offset the human fatigue factor for search and rescue (SAR) operations and we are very excited about the benefits to SAR outcomes.”

Sentient Director of Business Development, Strategy and Partnerships, Simon Olsen, said ViDAR’s inclusion on the AMSA SAR aircraft was validation of its proven capability.

“With ViDAR, Cobham will be able to provide AMSA with a proven, mature, highly capable visual detection system suited to the SAR role,” he said. “We are proud that Cobham has chosen our system as part of a sophisticated sensor suite that can be trusted to deliver during critical, life- saving SAR operations.”

“The majority of search and rescue efforts begin with electronic guidance to the area of the emergency,” said Simon Olsen, Sentient Director of Business Development, Strategy and Partnerships. “But once on station, most operations come down to a visual search to find an object in the water. Kestrel Maritime ViDAR is like a radar system for the visual spectrum, finding and highlighting targets that may have otherwise gone unseen by the operators.”

By using pixel-level analysis of the sensor’s digital feed, ViDAR detects small objects such as boats, life rafts and people and automatically displays their positions on the operator’s screen. The system dramatically improves detection capability, particularly in environments where adverse weather and operator fatigue may degrade the ability for visual search.

ViDAR will give the aircraft unprecedented capability in the critical final phase of search and rescue operations, ensuring high detection rates and accuracy. ViDAR represents a significant advancement for the Kestrel Maritime software system, which has already seen service on Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion and Canadian CP-140 Aurora maritime patrol aircraft and the Insitu ScanEagle unmanned aerial system. In March this year the US Navy selected Kestrel as part its mission control system for the MQ-8 Fire Scout rotary wing shipboard UAS. The Kestrel Maritime system has more than 15,000 hours of operational history.