Darwin McDaniel
Abaco has introduced a new research and development evaluation platform designed to reduce the time, cost and risk in developing autonomous technologies for military applications on land, in the air and at sea.
The electronic systems maker announced Thursday its new Obox platform at the AUSA Global Force conference at Von Braun Center in Huntsville, Ala.
"We created the Obox to give customers the optimum head-start in developing autonomous platforms by providing a turnkey solution – pre-integrating the hardware and software on which to build -Â enabling them to focus faster on the specifics of the planned application rather than on the low-level platform," said Peter Thompson, vice president of product management at Abaco.
Obox features Abaco's 3U VPX single board computers, FPGA/DSP subsystems and AI/GPGPU-enabled platforms for high-speed computing power and network switches.
Commercial off-the-shelf technologies were also used to build the platform, including Xeon processors from Intel, the CUDA-enabled GPUs from NVIDIA and an FPGA technology from Xilinx.
“Software integration at the ground and node layers offers the customers the benefit of pre-consolidating the image processing and neural network algorithms widely used in machine learning for autonomous vehicle applications,†Abaco said.
Obox collects data from multiple sensors, including Lidar and radar, and converts information into imagees through Abaco's AXIS ImageFlex.
