by AUVSI News 

 Four wide-area image capture payloads are in Brazil and will help oversee the upcoming Olympics, says the president of the U.S.-based company that built the systems.



AUVSI member Logos Technologies, based in Fairfax, Virginia, has been building persistent-surveillance, wide-area motion imagery systems that have been deployed in the field for a decade, based on technology that Logos President John Marion helped develop at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.



The Constant Hawk system first deployed to Iraq in 2006 and was refreshed for use in Afghanistan in 2008. That system weighs several thousand pounds and requires up to four kilowatts of power to run and a large aircraft to carry it.



That system obviously required large aircraft to transport it. The company also developed a smaller version, Kestrel, which was deployed to forward bases in Afghanistan starting in 2011, flying aboard aerostats.



That system weighs only 150 pounds and racked up some serious time in the air, with more than 180,000 operational hours under its belt.



However, Logos wanted to build an even smaller system, one that would not run afoul of export constraints and that could fit on even smaller aerostats. It built Simera, a much lighter, daytime-only sensor. 



“It weighs only 40 pounds, which means it can go on much smaller aerostats,” Marion says.



Only on the market for a little over a year, Simera attracted the attention of a Brazilian aerostat company Altave, which was responding to a Ministry of Justice request for lightweight security systems to use at the summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, which kicks off Aug. 5.



Logos built four systems for them, and they were accepted by the Ministry of Justice for August. “They are training with them now,” Marion tells AUVSI.



The system can track a city-sized area with a resolution equal to that of Google Earth.



“You can see people, but you can’t really see faces,” Marion says. “You can track vehicles as well.”



The system can store video and replay it like a digital video recorder. They can also record full-motion video and be used in conjunction with high-resolution sensors that can zoom in on targets of interest.



“Say there was an explosion there; you would have one person watching that in real time,” Marion says. “Another person might start going back in time to figure out what happened. And then if it was implanted earlier than that, you might try to find when it was implanted and track that person back to where they came from.”



Each Simera also comes with a “watchbox” function, which alerts analysts to motion activity within a predefined area.



“The watchbox is essentially intended as an alarm,” Marion says. “That’s a real force multiplier, in the sense that one operator can look at four different areas [using the Simeras on the aerostats], … and also, in the background, he can be running these watchboxes to keep track of movement.”



Aside from Olympics security, other uses for the system include anti-poaching, port security, border security, disaster relief or any sort of application where wide-area surveillance is needed, Marion says.



The company is planning an even smaller variant that could be carried by even smaller aircraft and plans to have them on the market soon, Marion says.

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