Elbit Systems, Windward team for Indian maritime surveillance

Elbit Systems has announced that it has teamed with Windward to address the India’s maritime surveillance requirements. The companies will offer a joint potential solution combining Windward’s satellite-based maritime analytics system, MarInt, with Elbit Systems’ Hermes 900 UAV platform, to provide a maritime area monitoring capability.

MarInt is a satellite-based maritime analytics system, which maps the global maritime activity in detail, based on data collected from various sources, such as commercial satellites, open-source data bases and other sensors. MarInt is designed to deliver maritime domain awareness over littoral or blue water areas of interest, for Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) monitoring, fishery control, regional traffic analysis or port traffic management. After the routine maritime patterns are observed and learned, the system performs deep behavior analysis on every vessel spotted in the designated area of interest, in order to detect anomalous and suspicious behavior.

According to Elbit Systems, MarInt operates 24/7 to pinpoint suspicious activity and enable the tasking of unmanned assets such as UAS to patrol the designated areas, identify and track the vessels to optimise aerial patrol and increasing mission effectiveness while reducing cost.

The Maritime Hermes 900 is a new configuration of Elbit Systems’ largest UAS, adapted for maritime operations, carrying selectable mission payload of up to 350kg, including maritime surveillance radar, Automatic Identification System (AIS), an electro-optical multi-sensor payload and electronic surveillance systems. It has the endurance to cover vast ocean areas, redundant line-of-sight and satellite communications links and radio relay, enabling operators to talk to local vessels while flying patrolling remote sea areas at extended ranges from shore.

Elbit Systems and Windward plan to demonstrate the system at Aero-India 2013.