US Army and Core Avionics & Industrial Inc. Announce Collaboration on Crew Mission Station (CMS) aligned to the FACE™ Technical Standard for the UH-60 Blackhawk Program
Army FACE Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM), Huntsville, Alabama – Sept 18, 2018 – US Army and Core Avionics & Industrial Inc. (“CoreAVI”) announced today that their successful collaboration on the Crew Mission Station (CMS), technology demonstration program for UH-60 Blackhawk aircraft, has resulted in CMS being selected for a Limited User Evaluation (LUE). The prototype CMS is running CoreAVI’s ArgusCore™ OpenGL® SC 1.0.1 graphics library suite and EGL_EXT_Compositor on Intel® i7 hardware with embedded HD5000 graphics displayed on Avalex’s 6” x 8” smart display. Fully integrated with Presagis’s ARINC 661 server, the CMS could be the first system evaluated by warfighters using the EGL_EXT_Compositor extension, taking advantage of its flexible graphics windowing capabilities within their multiple guest OS architecture.
The system uses the Wind River® VxWorks® 653 Multi-core Edition on Intel and supports multiple processes within each guest OS virtual machine. The CMS is planned to be the first known implementation of the display management services as defined in Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical Standard (TS) Edition 3.0. The FACE TS promotes portability of software through well-defined open interfaces helping reduce the time needed to add new and enhanced applications to the CMS.
The system utilizes a data model for the CMS UoPs aligned to the FACE TS 2.1 created using the TES-SAVi AWESUM FAME FACE Data Model tool suite. Developed by Tucson Embedded Systems (TES), AWESUM FAME provides advanced data model features, data model migration to the latest FACE Technical Standard Edition 3.0 and auto-generation of software, documentation, and TSS/IDL. AWESUM FAME helps streamline model development, integration, and deployment.
“Adding capabilities into our legacy platforms has been costly in both time and money,” said Joe Carter, U.S. Army PEO Aviation Acting CIO/G6 & The Open Group FACE Consortium Steering Committee Chairman. “Utilizing the FACE Approach, PM Utility and AMRDEC collaborated with CoreAVI and Wind River to develop and rapidly integrate a graphics compositor solution enabled by software aligned to the FACE Technical Standard. We are excited that this new capability will be put in warfighters’ hands as part of the CMS LUE and we view this as additional evidence the FACE Approach is working to help us prevent vendor lock, increase innovation and reduce cost.”
“The CMS could be the inaugural utilization by warfighters of CoreAVI’s EGL_EXT_Compositor extension,” said Damian Fozard, CEO of CoreAVI. “CoreAVI is happy to work together with the US Army to assist in realizing a system that supports more rapid integration of future advanced capabilities.“
“Wind River is proud to be the virtualization foundation of this revolutionary avionics capability,” said Chip Downing, Senior Director of Aerospace and Defense at Wind River. “This solution proves that new military platforms based upon open architecture platforms, such as those aligned to the FACE Technical Standard, can rapidly compress the time of reaching the warfighers for new avionics capabilities.”
AMRDEC is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command, which has the mission to develop technology and engineering solutions for America’s Warfighters. AMRDEC employs nearly 11,000 civilian scientists, researchers, and engineers.
RDECOM is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command. AMC is the Army’s premier providers of materiel readiness – technology, acquisition support, materiel development, logistics power projection, and sustainment – to the total force, across the spectrum of joint military operations.”