Tony White, chief technology officer (land) at Ultra Electronics, discusses top products and the company’s focus on wearable technology during an interview with Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian at the 2018 AUSA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Our AUSA coverage is brought to you by Bell, a Textron Company, Elbit System of America, L3 Technologies, Leonardo DRS, and Safran.
UltraElectronics
AUSA Annual Meeting
October 2018
Vago Muradian: Welcome to the Defense and Aerospace Report. I’m Vago Muradian here at the Association of the United States Army’s Annual Conference and Trade Show in Washington, DC, the number one event for U.S. Army leaders from around the world to gather here to discuss the future of the service, its strategy, technology, doctrine, and more, and budgets and more. Our coverage here is sponsored by Bell, a Textron company; Elbit Systems of America; L3 Technologies; Leonardo DRS; and SAFRAN.
We’re here at the Ultra Electronics booth, one of the world’s most innovative companies, to talk to Tony White, who is the Chief Technology Officer of the company’s ground systems business.
Tony, it’s a pleasure seeing you.
Tony White: You too. It’s been a while since I’ve been out here, a year, and I’m losing my voice because it’s been a busy week so far.
Mr. Muradian: Exactly.
What are the top products you guys are highlighting? The U.S. Army’s made it clear we’re in a great power competition mode, but at the same time we’ll have to do counterinsurgency, a much more contested electromagnetic spectrum, some of the things that you guys are quite expert at. Talk to us a little bit about what some of the top products and the conversations you’re having with the U.S. Army are.
Mr. White: Sure. I think the big one for us is a product called UltraLYNX which is a wearable soldier system that was developed in the UK to meet a UK requirement that’s got massive interest now in the U.S. with the Net Warrior Program. UltraLYNX for us is getting a lot of pull. We’ve spent a lot of time with the Net Warrior team recently at Fort Benning on the Army warfighting experiment where we’ve had some success in developing a relationship with Net Warrior to the point I think where we can really benefit with some technology with them.
It’s a wearable power and data hub that’s smart. It’s like a small computer that allows them to integrate devices they’d not thought about integrating before to give the warfighter a better chance in the field.
Mr. Muradian: What are some other things? Because you guys have everything from antenna to jammers to everything else here.
Mr. White: Sure. This is tri-[inaudible] radio, so a tri-band radio called ORION which is picking up a contract right now with a PEO. We have products for hand control, for a UAV and UGV, so sort of unmanned areas. We’ve got products here on the show for vehicle electronics. We’re fielding up power and data management onto vehicles both in the UK and Europe and now in the States. We’ve got product here around us, a product called HyperSpike which is an acoustic [inaudible] for crowd control.
So a huge portfolio of product. It’s very difficult to categorize it into one area. We cover a lot of ground.
Mr. Muradian: But the LYNX system you have is just extraordinary in terms of personal power management, which I think is game-changing and why you guys, there’s been so much interest in it.
So you’re the Chief Technology Officer, you’re a technologist, an engineer. What are some of the most either trends, technology trends that you find exciting or terrifying or both? Where do you see like wow, okay, that’s going to be a problem we’re going to have to address, or that’s a great opportunity. We should be exploiting it.
Mr. White: I think for me right now it’s along wearables. If someone said Tony, what’s the thing? It’s wearables. Everything in our home life is around wearable technology. So it’s mobile, it’s wearable, it’s in the cloud, it’s AI, it’s machine learning. So all of those things. So we’re doing some work now on all of that. So what’s the next generation of wearables? LYNX is the kind of integration piece in the middle. What can I hang on it? So we’re looking at everything from gesture control to smart glasses to thought control and doing stuff with the brain, to biometrics. All kinds of different things related to the wearable technology we’re seeing in the consumer market and what may be coming in two or three years’ time there, and how we might be able to pull that in now and adopt it for military use.
Mr. Muradian: You mentioned thought control. I know there’s always a tendency of people going to tin foil hats and things like that. But what does that mean? That is, in the cognitive field, that is something that folks are more and more experimenting with and see as a future opportunity.
Mr. White: This is, in the field, it’s known as brain-computer interfacing, so it’s the ability to take brain waves and interface that with the computer, and allow your brain to command things on the computer. That might be as simple as have a thought and press the space bar, or manipulate something on the screen. And what we’re looking at is how we can take that thought control technology, map it through LYNX and have things you’ve got connected up controlled by thought. So the ability to maybe change the channel on the radio, or turn the volume up or down on the radio, or activate a device hands-free using thought.
Mr. Muradian: I wish I could hands-free activate somebody to be more considerate occasionally. Talking loudly, for example, on a quiet train.
One of the two soapbox issues for you are first, all the different standards that different militaries have. The UK, for example, has power purity and electromagnetic interference standards that are unique from anything around the world. We discussed if an armored vehicle is making its way across the ocean, somehow it becomes non-compliant by the time it approaches the UK. The United States has a different standard in its Mil spec standards, and the rest of the world have their own standards. We’re in a world where at least allied countries are cooperating more closely.
What sort of work has to happen in an international standard because we have ISO standards? The commercial world has an enormous number of universal standards that make business easier and cooperation easier. What kind of a system do we need globally to ensure that systems are interoperable, are able to at least connect and work together?
Mr. White: I think it’s a challenge, and the challenge is not new. It’s being chiseled away, so my frustration is it could be happening quicker. So there’s lots of people who have a similar mind to mine, why do we have these different standards? And then if we understand why, then how? How can they be similar or how can we align them a bit better? And the tendency is buried in history. There’s a lot of things to do with sensitive equipment, which means we have to have more sensitive power standards in the UK. And we’re not alone. There are other countries that have sensitive equipment too. We really do need to look at those.
We get some really ironic things, some crazy things like when I test something I put it on a bench and the standard defines the height and size of a bench that I’m testing on. The differences between the tests are a few inches. So the U.S. standard says it needs to be this high. The UK standard says it needs to be this high. Therefore, you can’t use the same test. You’ve got to do two different tests, and those tests are expensive and they take time. So that is an easy fix. We need to harmonize that. We can’t keep arguing about two or three inches of bench heights that could be a differentiator. It’s just ridiculous.
So I think those are my frustrations. Those things take time.
Already in the UK, there’s a re-write of our power standard underway, and I sit on that re-write panel, and my in is to say come on guys, you know, this is our opportunity to start harmonization.
So hopefully the ball’s rolling. My frustration, it’s just not happening quick enough. And I think there are other standards, not just the power one, we need to address.
Mr. Muradian: I was going to say that that bench height is, the bench-maker got that standard written and he said hey, my bench is better than your bench is, and I got it in the rules.
What are some of the rules you think should be changed? I mean I think the bench height one, I’m sure may have some vague connection, but what are some other standards that could go the way of the Dodo.
Mr. White: We’ve got some different EMI requirements and actually the world we live in, you mentioned the coalition stuff. So our EMI requirement in the UK is different from the U.S. We actually run the same operation and see the same threats. So it kind of makes sense that EMI would be the same. We’re seeing the same threat, the same thing, we’re in the same environment. So EMI is one.
The other one, of course, is perhaps redefinition or a better definition of the term open architecture.
Mr. Muradian: That was going to be the next thing. You’re like, everybody who says open architecture has a different definition of it.
Mr. White: Sure. I’m on a [graphic] of open architecture. I sit on the UK [inaudible] working group for [Land Open Systems] architecture and I’m on the [graphic] of it. The problem is everyone is now talking about it. Everything has an open architecture. Whether you believe it has an open architecture or not, someone will tell you that system has an open architecture. So what is openness? What do we mean? What do we mean actually by architecture? I think if we get some common understanding it will actually allow us to have a better conversation about having and integrating open things. Right now it’s quite a confused picture. So I can pick up something that a vendor claims is open and demonstrate that actually, it’s not very open at all. I can pick up something that’s very open and say look, here’s an open architecture and they would disagree with me. I think that issue is prolific. I think it’s very difficult to talk about, without getting into some detail, I’ll give you an example of something, and it’s certainly not a criticism. Bear in mind, I’m in the U.S.
So the U.S. has a standard called Victory for vehicle electronics, and that standard is open, but it’s open to a U.S. citizen working on a U.S. defense program. It’s not open to anyone else in the world. So in the UK, we can’t get hold of Victory. Well, how open is a standard if it’s only available in its host nation to their own systems.
That’s I guess what I mean by open. We need to get a better baseline about what we mean by open. And then we can then really realize the benefits in those coalition things because we can start to bring together interoperability between those nations because we’re all sharing the same open standard.
Mr. Muradian: How much cost do you reckon is burned up because of this? How much money and effort have to go into harmonizing these standards that are more impediments, perhaps, than actual necessary standards?
Mr. White: I think for the open architecture standards, and I’m a firm believer in this. See if this works. I think it’s not a lot of spend, and we have to do it because the situation that we have historically is closed. So it’s similar phrases we can use, but we talk about vendor lock-in or being locked to a particular solution for life because you bought something that’s closed. So I’ve designed something. Here’s my system. I own all the interfaces. If you want to change something you have to come to me and you have to pay me lots of money and we’ll make a change.
In our open world, and we do this at home. Everything you have at home it probably has an open standard, it has an open architecture. You can make changes. So an android, a Samsung phone, an android is a great example of something that’s really open.
Something a little more closed, Apple. Apple is open kind of. It has to be Apple certified through an Apple connector, so it’s not so open.
Mr. Muradian: And do you think that an adoption of a commercial standard is a better way to go ultimately?
Mr. White: So what you’ll find in the open standard, open architecture world is exactly that. What you’ll find is the standards like Victory and generic vehicle architecture in the UK and NATO, are making use of those open standards that are publicly available. So Ethernet is an open standard, DDS is an open standard. So we’re starting to use those commercially available standards and wrap them in military speak and it allows us to make use of and maintain our world using those commercially available standards. That is bringing down cost.
Mr. Muradian: Tony White, the Chief Technology Officer at Ultra Electronics Land business. Absolute pleasure. Enjoyed it, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Mr. White: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Mr. Muradian: Unless nobody lets you in the country again because — I’m just kidding. Thanks, Tony.
Mr. White: I know their thoughts already.
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