Lite Cycles

LCI devised and proposed a highly compact airborne multispectral LIDAR sensor system concept in response to a Navy solicitation for a tactical UAV-deployed littoral mine and obstacle detection system to provide day and night surveillance of very shallow water (VSW), the surf-zone (SZ) and the beach zone (BZ). The competitive procurement was awarded to LCI under the Office of Naval Research's Organic Mine Countermeasures Future Naval Capabilities (OMCM FNC) program. The ROAR ® system uses an innovative LCI proprietary ISDT receiver architecture. The ISDT tightly couples all receiver components and LIDAR electronics to achieve the system compaction required for tactical UAV integration, while providing a large receiver aperture and a programmable scanning function for wide area search with temporally displaced multiple looks on the fly for clutter reduction. The ISDT incorporates a 128 x 128 3D camera using Readout Integrated Circuit (ROIC) technology developed by an LCI teammate, an LCI-developed large-array range-gated ICMOS camera, and a precision rangefinder that incorporates technology from LCI's ESLRF product line. New processing algorithms for mine detection in the very challenging SZ clutter environment, which offer the potential for significant processing gains in comparison to the legacy approaches, are under development. ROAR ® is the proposed Preplanned Product Improvement (P 3 I) for the Navy's Coastal Battlefield Reconnaissance and Analysis (COBRA) Engineering and Manufacturing Development (E&MD) passive airborne BZ mine hunting system.