jon@june.cs.washington.edu (Jon Jacky) (06/26/89)
From: jon@june.cs.washington.edu (Jon Jacky) Here are excerpts from AVIATION WEEK, May 1 1989, pps. 85--86: MARTIN PURSUES DEVELOPMENT OF AUTONOMOUS CRUISE MISSILE by Edward H. Kolcum Martin Marietta Electronic Systems is developing the technology for a cruise missile that could locate and attack high-value targets, perform damage assesment and return to home base. The system, called AAV (for autonomous air vehicle) involves advanced avionics and computational techniques. It is part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program. ... The goal is a weapon that is intelligent enough to search out a target against a variety of background clutter, attack it with smart submunitions, assess damage, re-attack if necessary, avoid defenses, and fly back to a recovery site. .... While the primary targets will be mobile ICBM's, communications centers and other strategic relocatable systems, the AAV will be designed to loiter in an area until a target becomes available, and to look for easier, secondary objectives such as aircraft parked on runways. It will also be designed to collect and store target information for analysis by reconnaissance experts... Martin Marietta believes the technologies being developed in the AAV program can be applied to some of its munitions for a new generation of ``very smart'' weapons that could include Copperhead, Hellfire, and ADATs, the combined air- defense, anti-tank system. ... Wade G. Pemberton, Martin Marietta Smart Weapons Program director, said the concept has been demonstrated on the company's Simulation and Test Laboratory terrain board and that a four-month captive-carry flight test program will begin in October. ...The autonomous air vehicle effort is one of DARPA's technology incentive programs that is costing over $15 million over a 30-month contract period. Texas Instruments has a competing development and demonstration contract ... Pemberton said the (AAV) system is built around Martin Marietta's Geometric Arithmetic Parallel Processor (GAPP), a small computer that can analyze thousands of picture elements that comprise infrared imagery ... GAPP was originally developed for night-vision systems and is proposed as part of the company's improved ... night navigation and targetting system for US Army/ Douglas Apache helicopters .... [ This article is illustrated with a painting that also appeared in DARPA's 1987 Strategic Computing Annual report, showing the ``smart'' cruise missile opening what look like bomb-bay doors to release two smaller ``smart'' missiles that are heading for mobile missile launchers. Also shown is another picture, a photo of Martin Marietta's ``terrain board'' which is a model of a countryside, looking a bit like a model train layout, with a bunch of instruments hanging from a moveable gantry overhead. Martin Marietta was the prime contractor for DARPA's autonomous land vehicle (ALV) project, which debuted with some fanfare in 1983 as part of DARPA's Strategic Computing Program and which apparently was something of a disappointment; it hasn't been heard from much lately. ] - Jon Jacky, University of Washington