Army readies on-demand imagery tool for battlefield use

The Army has plans to deploy the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Heterogeneous Airborne Reconnaissance Team system, or HART, in-theater with one of its combat teams in Afghanistan later this summer once it has been ruggedized, reports Aviation Week.  

While the Army is only intending to use the system – at least initially – to enable its soldiers to cull on-demand video from aircraft onto their mobile computing devices, HART not only downloads video from most any aircraft, including the service’s unmanned aircraft systems like the Raven, but also collects real-time video, archives imagery and can control multiple unmanned aerial vehicle platforms concurrently, among other capabilities.

And HART might also be adapted and used in the future to process intelligence information and direct targeting on UAVs.