- Defense
Netans: an Intelligent DDU in an era of Navigation Warfare
With the advent of military-grade GNSS systems, single-source uninterrupted, accurate and reliable real-time navigation data was once made easily accessible to surface vessels. At the same time, subsurface platforms remained very dependent on diverse sources of sensor data which has to be assessed, compared and post-processed to build up coherent and reliable navigation information.
However, recent intense development in threats to GNSS signals have raised strong concerns in the military. To compound matters, navigation information has become even more critical for the success of naval operations, particularly as a significant contributor to the effective performance of increasingly sophisticated sensors and effectors on board surface combatants and submarines.
These developments put ever more critical demands on navigation information, in terms of performance, reliability, robustness and availability. Moreover, there is a discernable trend towards convergence in surface and subsurface requirements, notably with regard to resilience in hostile environments.
In response, together with the Marins Series Inertial Navigation Systems which offer navies the highest performance and most robust inertial technology available, iXblue has developed Netans, a new range of smart naval Data Distribution Units, tailored to meet the most challenging requirements for surface and subsurface platforms in an era of Navigation Warfare.
Netans DDUs not only distribute the individual sensor data, they also acquire, analyze, correlate, validate, select and, if needed, raise alarms or even reject the diverse input data, to elaborate the most complete real-time merged and consolidated Navigation Information available to subscriber systems (and most notably the weapon system). Built-in navigation algorithms deliver the most reliable, coherent and accurate information, relying on the most consistent data (inertial, GNSS, magnetic, terrain, log, etc.), whatever the environmental conditions.
Netans key features include built-in redundancy management, hot-swapping capability and sensor auto-recognition to ensure data robustness, integrity and validity. Netans DDUs are simple to install, with an integration process reduced to simple prerecorded settings, easy to use through an intuitive interface, versatile and scalable.
With the Netans series, iXblue once again extends its scope of expertise in the Navigation domain, to bring you the best-in-class navigation solution to achieve superiority in your naval operations.