Head-steered sensor solution for enhanced situational awareness

This paper describes a modificattion to an Army Driver's Vision Enhancement (DVE) system. The FLIR turret gimbals are instrumented with resolvers to enable a feedback control loop. The FLIR video is displayed on a head-mounted binocular display system which has an integrated head tracker for pointing the FLIR turret. The paper describes and compares several candidate head tracker technologies. An acoustic head tracker was selected as a baseline to demonstrate the concept in a simple and quick manner. Additionally, a hybrid oplical/inertial tracker implementation is discussed which also has capability to minimize effects of vibration on the DVE system.