Australian search and surveillance specialist Sentient Vision Systems has announced the first flight of its ViDAR pod system, the VMS-5 (ViDAR Maritime Surveillance) Day/Night Optical Radar pod. The VMS-5 Day/Night pod is the first of a range of ViDAR surveillance pods configured for different missions and aircraft types. VMS pods will be available for customer delivery during the first half of 2021. ViDAR (Visual Detection and Ranging) is an Optical Radar that can autonomously detect small objects on the sea surface over very wide areas, by day and night, in conditions up to Sea State 6. ViDAR has proven its capability as both a Search and Rescue (SAR) and a maritime search and surveillance tool, with demand for support of a wide range of missions growing globally, including drug interdiction, anti-piracy and illegal fishing detection.
Since 2016, Sentient has supplied ViDAR as a software-based solution to operators who’ve integrated it successfully aboard many manned and unmanned, fixed-wing and rotary wing platforms. Responding to market and partner demand the company is now stepping up to also become an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) offering ViDAR as a complete solution, including sensors and processors, for operators around the world.
“ViDAR offers customers much better wide-area situational awareness at a lower cost than anything else available,” said Dr Paul Boxer, Sentient’s managing director. “This is especially the case in Search and Rescue (SAR) operations. By building our own integrated ViDAR pods we’re able to offer customers an enhanced surveillance capability backed up by dedicated support. Importantly, we control the quality and reliability of the ViDAR installation to deliver a more consistent, well-engineered, end-to-end integration and training process.”
The ViDAR VMS-5 pod is equipped with multiple fixed, high-resolution cameras with a combined Field of View (FoV) of 180 degrees. From an altitude of 1500ft at a speed of about 90kt, they scan a surface swath 3.2 nautical miles wide to find targets as small as a person in the water. If the mission objective is to find a suspicious boat with a low radar cross-section then the ViDAR swath can easily be increased to over 25nm from 5,000ft. If the target is within its field of view, ViDAR will spot it, even in Sea State 6 – increasing probability of detection to over 96 percent on first pass. The ViDAR software provides a thumbnail to the operator’s mission system showing the target and its location, enabling the operator to slew the platform’s primary sensor onto it for further inspection. The pods will be offered initially with two sensor types: a 60 Megapixel Electro-Optic (E/O) installation and a HD Infrared (IR) sensor for night and bad weather operations. Depending on the application these can also be equipped with a camera turret.
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