Defense technology provider MARSS took on a leading role at Red Sands 2024, showcasing its end-to-end integrated counter-unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS) solutions.
Jointly organized by the U.S. Army DEVCOM, ARCENT, and the Royal Saudi Air Forces, Red Sands 24.2 provided a test-bed for the latest technological solutions to deal with the rising threat of UAS attacks.
As an active participant in Red Sands over multiple years, MARSS took a leading role in this year’s exercise, demonstrating its end-to-end, detection to defeat, C2 systems – fully integrated with EOS’ remote weapon station.
Over the course of the exercise, MARSS’ AI-powered NiDAR platform was tested against numerous simulated drone attacks, including both Category 2 rotary-wing, and Category 3 fixed-wing UAS. The system successfully defeated multiple military-grade drones.
This performance was enabled by NiDAR’s inbuilt threat prioritization, which autonomously analyses radar tracks and EO/IR data to assess and order the potential risks, as well as providing the operator with a recommended course of action.
Overseen by a human in the loop, NiDAR then relayed detailed slew-to-cue data to EOS’ integrated remote weapon station to defeat the identified threat at exceptional speed.
MARSS’ additionally demonstrated its fully wireless C2 functionality. Enabled by its partnership with Silvus Technologies, MARSS was able to integrate multiple sensors. This included radars from Echodyne and SRC, and EO/IR sensors from Current Corp, to provide a unified tactical picture on a single display.
Josh Harman, Vice President of Business Development with MARSS, commented, “In Ukraine and across the Middle East the defense industry and users are identifying major shortfalls with deployed integrated and non-integrated air defense systems. With constantly evolving threats, the time for sensors, effectors and integrated capabilities to react, adjust and deploy is ever shortening, and some existing systems are struggling to keep up.
“Over the course of the Red Sands exercise, MARSS demonstrated multi-sensor integration on a single UI that was mature and devastatingly effective against the various air threats – reducing the decision cycle of ‘detect to defeat’ to a matter of seconds.
“Exercises, such as Red Sands, are critical for understanding the needs and pressure points for our customer-base. With so many drones being deployed daily, or even hourly, in active areas, it’s imperative that any CUAS system can target the drones, but also the operators.
“MARSS’ NiDAR is able to do just that – enabling our customers to protect the public from the immediate threat, and future threats as well. It is capabilities such as these, combined with our ability to detect-and-defeat everything up to Cat 3 drone, that make MARSS’ systems so valued by our customers.”
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