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w w w. m r c y. c o m WHITE PAPER The power of digital convergence In the fall of 2000, the Sharp Corporation released their J-SH04 into the Japanese market. This was the first cellphone with a built-in camera. Seven years later in the US, Apple Inc. released their cellphone with a camera – The iPhone®. An example of commercial digital convergence – The smartphone Who, when first learning of a camera sensor being integrated into a telephone considered it a must-have device or even if it was particularly practical? Some may have considered the combination a distraction as size, weight and power all increased, as did the phone's sticker price and complexity. Although the vast majority of us didn't know it then, digital convergence in the communication domain had started. Almost immediately innovation accelerated and now, a decade after Apple an- nounced the iPhone, commercial digital convergence has redefined just about every aspect of our lives. "If the military doesn't move forward with driverless technology it risks re-experiencing what it did with mo- bile devices. Warfighters will wonder why they have the technology at home, but as soon as they pass through their base gates, they go back in time a decade." National Defense Magazine, March 2017 Today, the iPhone and its peers are rugged, miniaturized smart devices that collect sensor data (camera, gyroscope, GPS, etc.), communicate with the world via the Internet, cellular network, and Bluetooth and it is all made possible through adept, converged and miniaturized process- ing. These devices output to a grid of affects that includes navigation, entertainment, organizers and a secure means of payment, to name a few. An idea that started half-a-world away, less than two decades later has changed information sharing, communication, what is possible and the lives of nearly everyone, everywhere. Collectively the capabilities delivered by digitally converged smart- phones nullify the original nay-sayers' concerns of size, complexity, af- fordability and desirability. This is the power of digital convergence. Now that the digital convergence roadmap has been established, other industries are applying a similar strategy to profoundly transform their domains. Whether it is in the industrial internet of things (IIoT), smart buildings or automated distribution systems, digital convergence is ev- erywhere. However, nowhere is this transformation more apparent than in the domain of autonomous cars and smart vehicles. "The convergence of new technologies may allow autono- mous, small, smart and cheap weapons based on land, sea, or air to dominate combat." – CATO Institute For autonomous vehicles to deliver their promise of safe, efficient travel it requires a convergence of extensive sensing, cognitive decision mak- ing and safe effector implementation. With big financial bets being placed by Google, Apple, Amazon, Uber, Tesla and the automobile indus- try as a whole, the momentum of innovation has become unstoppable. With a proven technology roadmap, the availability of powerful proces- sors and sensors, vehicle autonomy has passed its technological event horizon. Many next-generation flying taxi startup companies are working towards similar commercial solutions that fly without pilots. Military digital convergence concept Digital transformation is not a new concept in defense. It has its roots in the digitization of sensor technologies. This transformation needs next-generation architecture that converges the C4ISR data on and off military platforms. What's new is the amount of data being collected by an ever-growing fleet of interconnected platforms and the promise of that data to facilitate new missions both on and off platform. Mili- tary digital convergence is the roadmap to realizing that promise. Group 3 UAV Sensor processing characteristics Sensor processing subassemblies are powerful, real-time process- ing engines that turn the large data streams from complex sensors like radars and EO/IR focal planes in to information. Sensor pro- cessing is required to be trusted and secure to prevent malicious content and making them resilient to reverse-engineered and un- authorized data access efforts. Security hardening has often been side-stepped through DoD waivers in the interest of expedience. In 2016, the DoD stated that security has become so paramount that waivers for systems going oversees will no longer be issued. Pro- cessing security and trusted data in the modern world is so impor- tant, it trumps everything and it has to be built-in to every military processing subsystem. The main thesis of digital convergence is centralizing the compute re- sources of all the avionics sensors into a combined mission and flight computer. The result is a software-defined architecture that is inde- pendent of the hardware. This centralized processing hardware can be upgraded much more frequently than the sensors to accommodate enhanced processing techniques and expanded mission profiles. The software that runs on the central computing resources would be similar to an app running on a smart phone. 4

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