Elbit America recently showed off its X-Sight Helmet Display (HMD) system to customers in Huntsville, Alabama to showcase how the bug-eyed visor can provide helicopter pilots tactical displays and 360-degree super-vision.
HMDs for helicopter pilots aren't new, but they've tended to be heavy, awkward to wear, and have only limited capabilities. Building on the HMD built by Elbit for the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, the X-Sight aims to bring the same sort of enhanced vision features to the helicopter pilot, allowing them to concentrate on the mission instead of looking at cockpit displays.
Looking like a pair of insect eyes, the X-Sight visor fits over a standard helmet and is fed data from outside-mounted cameras, sensors, radar, lidar, databases, neural networks, and other sources at fast enough speeds to greatly reduce latency. The helmet gives the pilot a 360-degree view with a wide angle of vision that allows them to see through darkness, fog, rain, snow, and blowing sand well enough to not only cope with such hazards, but to use them for a tactical advantage.
In addition, the pilot's view is overlaid with a constantly updated stream of data about both the flight conditions and the outside world to both eyes simultaneously for greater realism. The system can identify friendly and enemy positions and can home in on a downed pilot's position for extraction without the helicopter pilot having to be distracted or wasting precious seconds.
According to the company, the X-Sight has been tailored for tactical low-altitude flying and is compatible with the AH-64E Apache attack helicopter and the US Army's Future Vertical Lift (FVL) platforms, which opens a very large market for the system.
"The system can receive data from LiDAR, RADAR, and other sensors aboard a helicopter’s payload," said Matthew Boyer, an Artificial Intelligence Engineering Manager at Elbit America. "Our goal is to seamlessly fuse these elements to provide as much information as possible to a pilot, while reducing their workload."
Source: Elbit America