SBIR-STTR Award

Special Operations Forces is looking for assault zone marking systems to facilitate instrument approaches of fixed and rotary wing aircraft under extremely low ceiling/visibility (LCN) conditions (200' ceiling/0.5 mile visibility). In this proposal, very innovative system and components designs are presented to fully realize above goal. Our innovations are: 1. Two lighting systems-ground lighting system (GLS) and a lighting system (ALS) are designed. The GLS is an active system using visible or invisible LED or LD to the ground marks. The ALS has no light from the ground marks, but has light from aircraft to illuminate the passive ground marks. One soldier can deploy and remove the assault zone marking system in a short time. 2. Parabolic LEDs and honeilluminator with projection lens are designed for ground or air lighting system. This inexpensive and totally eye-safe device can largely increase the illumination distance to illuminate an area of 30 M in a distance of 300 M with the use of off-the-shelf LLLCCD or I2 of Gen-III on the aircraft. 3. By using fibers to combine 40 PInGaAs laser dio together, a LD with CW output power of 15 W at eye-safe wavelength of 1.55 m has been achieved and can illuminate an area of 30 M in a distance of 300 M with the use of off-the-shelf uncooled InGaAs FPA. 4. simple variable focus projector head is designed to keep the same illuminating size in different distances thus the light will not be wasted. 5. A common aperture optical head is designed to let the FPA and L share the same lens and get the image from the same illuminating area. 6. An imaging laser ranger is designed by modulating the CW PInGaA laser or using eye-safe pulse laser Nd:YAG at 1.54 m to get the distance to the ground. This will be helpful to do instrument approach in harshest weather conditions. 7. Uncooled BST FPA in 1-35 m is ato get both active laser illuminated zone image and passive LIR zone image thus can do instrument approach with/without zone marks. 8. retroreflective paint, tape, or corner cube is used to largely increase the visibility of the zone mark for better instrument approach from longer distance in bad weather condition.

Special Operations Forces is looking for assault zone marking systems to facilitate instrument approaches of fixed and rotary wing aircraft under extremely low ceiling/visibility conditions (200' ceiling/0.5 mile visibility). After successfully finishing the phase-I project, in this phase-II effort, we will concentrate on the whole assault zone marking/lighting system design, calculation/simulation, prototyping, measurement, lab/field test, modification, retest, and give a complete specification for future manufacturing and field deploying of the system. Following innovative research will be deeply addressed

Keywords:
Assault Zone Marking, Lighting System, Parabolic Led, Eye-Safe Ld,Lll Ccd Camera ,Uncooled Fpa