Keith Ballantyne

General purpose computing processors, those aimed at the desktop and server markets, are evolving to greater performance levels but generally lack meaningful consideration of size and power requirements. Special purpose processors and systems on a chip consider the importance of size and power requirements, but either lag behind their general purpose counterparts in compute capability or become limited to specific types of processing. Despite the limits, optimized reduced instruction set… Show more

General purpose computing processors, those aimed at the desktop and server markets, are evolving to greater performance levels but generally lack meaningful consideration of size and power requirements. Special purpose processors and systems on a chip consider the importance of size and power requirements, but either lag behind their general purpose counterparts in compute capability or become limited to specific types of processing. Despite the limits, optimized reduced instruction set computer architectures like the ARMv8 cores used in many consumer products can frequently be used as efficiently as dedicated field programmable gate arrays, graphics processing units or digital signal processors when performing signals analysis, and perform much better than their complex instruction set computer counterparts in terms of size, power consumption, and thermal dissipation. The ability to minimize size, weight, and power and to maximize compute power is central to providing solutions that
are useful in future operations. This paper examines the trade-offs between these two approaches and presents results from processing select data sets using different architectures. It also examines supply-chain and manufacturing concerns associated with delivering trustworthy, modular, general-purpose solutions for cyber electromagnetic activity operations. Show less

Flight of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the national airspace (NAS) represents a significant commercial opportunity for growth. The ability to safely and effectively integrate smaller autonomous aircraft into a broader aviation environment is limited in two ways: lack of definitive goals and incomplete technology. This paper argues that establishing a goal in the form of a Turing test for UAVs would help move technology in a direction towards achieving unmanned flight in the national… Show more

Flight of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the national airspace (NAS) represents a significant commercial opportunity for growth. The ability to safely and effectively integrate smaller autonomous aircraft into a broader aviation environment is limited in two ways: lack of definitive goals and incomplete technology. This paper argues that establishing a goal in the form of a Turing test for UAVs would help move technology in a direction towards achieving unmanned flight in the national airspace. It includes brief overviews of some research areas that are likely to contribute to meeting reliability requirements for safe flight of smaller UAVs. Though many of the challenges associated with autonomous flight are considered hard artificial intelligence problems, this paper argues that the ridged environment of manned aviation affords some opportunity for simplification. Show less

This paper describes a Java-centric approach to the development of a service-oriented architecture. It introduces many of the technologies readily available within Java to realize a Web service architecture, and explains some of the difficulty encountered during the realization of specific Web services necessary to implement a strategic planning process. Preliminary
results indicate that robust support of service-oriented architecture is available using Java technologies, but efficiently… Show more

This paper describes a Java-centric approach to the development of a service-oriented architecture. It introduces many of the technologies readily available within Java to realize a Web service architecture, and explains some of the difficulty encountered during the realization of specific Web services necessary to implement a strategic planning process. Preliminary
results indicate that robust support of service-oriented architecture is available using Java technologies, but efficiently meeting non-functional requirements, such as security and platform independence, pose design challenges for the developer. Show less

A consideration of the many important non-functional requirements necessary in the conception and implementation of an interoperable ground control platform for unmanned systems.