DARPA’s Timothy Grayson, Lockheed Martin’s Rita Flaherty, and Intel’s Jonathan Doylend among top-line plenary speakers at 2021 SPIE DCS Digital Forum
From 12-16 April, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing Digital Forum will continue its more-than 45-year-run as the leading symposium on imaging, sensing, and photonic technologies used for defense and security applications, as well as showcasing emerging innovations for health care, industry, and environmental applications.
During this year's virtual event, world-class plenary speakers are scheduled to cover key topics such as warfare and sensing; autonomous vehicles and AI; and silicon photonics for lidar.
Grayson will open the symposium in a plenary session on Monday, 12 April, with "Mosaic Warfare and implications for novel sensing." His presentation will discuss how DARPA is developing Mosaic Warfare - a strategy where individual warfighting platforms are put together to make a larger package. The concept is an effort to move from expensive, complex, multi-function monolithic sensors to highly distributed, hyper-specialized sensors with each individual sensor addressing only a small part of an overall function. This specialization will allow for the deployment of sensors in greater numbers on smaller, cheaper platforms. Grayson's presentation will also address how DARPA is implementing Mosaic, the implications for sensing, and potential dual-use applications in the commercial sector.
At the symposium-wide plenary session on Tuesday, 13 April, Flaherty will discuss "Strategically integrating small business in the face of unprecedented challenges." Her presentation will address t ways in which pandemic- and budget-related impacts to the global supply chain have driven a change in how we approach partnerships with small businesses and the people-power they provide. Her talk will also focus on the importance of cultivating productive and mutually beneficial relationships with suppliers while simultaneously driving economic development in local communities. In addition, she will cover the challenge of virtual recruiting, encouraging diversity in the workforce while attracting local talent and the avenues for small business to connect with Lockheed Martin.
Starting with an overview of standards and FDA guidance for IRT performance evaluation, implementation, and regulation policies, Wang will present results from a large-scale clinical study of fever-screening IRTs, as well as discussing the impact of consensus guidelines and facial measurement location on performance. This study found that while high-quality IRTs implemented according to international standards can help to accurately measure temperature, current standards can be improved to further enhance IRT performance.
Young will discuss how DARPA's Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program aims to make sure algorithms aren't a limiting part of the system and that autonomous combat vehicles can meet or exceed soldier-driving abilities. RACER will offer game-changing unmanned ground vehicle UGV mobility, focused on speed and resiliency, using a combination of simulation and advanced platforms. Goals for the RACER program include not only autonomy algorithms, but also the creation of simulation-based approaches and environments that will support rapid advancement of self-driving capabilities for future UGVs.
Doylend notes that lidar is emerging as a necessity for fully automated self-driving automotive applications. In order to sample the far field with sufficient resolution for this application, the system must incorporate several optical elements, which leads to challenges in manufacturability and size. Due to the density of optical components required, lidar is well suited for photonic integration in order to achieve miniaturization and scalable manufacturability. Doylend will give an overview of lidar, the components required for a chip-scale solution, and the progress of silicon photonics with lidar.
Read more about what's happening at the 2021 SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing Digital Forum.