U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk
The U.S. Army is evaluating a new crew mission station (CMS) for its fleet of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
Developed in collaboration with Core Avionics & Industrial Inc. (Core AVI), the Army has selected the system for a limited user evaluation (LUE). The CMS’s embedded architecture is aligned with the Open Group’s Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) technical standard.
A Wind River operating system, smart display from Avalex and an ARINC 661 server from Presagis were used to develop the CMS. Intel i7 hardware with embedded HD5000 graphics also help generate imagery on the Avalex smart display, according to CoreAVI.
If selected to upgrade Army Blackhawk cockpits, the CMS would become the first known implementation of the display management services that are defined in the FACE 3.0 technical standard. FACE is the Open Group’s initiative originally launched in 2012 to enable common data architectures and languages that can increase software portability across different military platforms.
CoreAVI’s ArgusCore OpenGL SC 1.0.1 graphics library suite and EGL_EXT_Compositor are also supporting the CMS. This is the first system using the EGL_EXT_Compositor extension to be evaluated by warfighters. The extension provides increased flexibility in graphics windowing within a multiple guest OS architecture, according to CoreAVI.
“The CMS could be the inaugural utilization by warfighters of CoreAVI’s EGL_EXT_Compositor extension,” said Damian Fozard, CEO of CoreAVI.
The LUE selection was announced during the recent FACE Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) in Alabama.
A data model aligned to the FACE 2.1 standard developed by Tucson Embedded Systems (TES) is also providing auto-generation of software, documentation, and TSS/IDL.