CarteNav and Sentient Vision are pleased to announce their valuable contribution to PAL Aerospace’s winning bid to provide the Government of Canada with aerial surveillance capability for Canada’s inland, coastal and offshore waters.

The contract, delivered on behalf of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, covers an initial five-year period and includes opportunities for PAL Aerospace to earn contract extensions that increase the total life of the agreement to ten years. As part of the winning bid, PAL aircraft will operate a specially configured Visual Detection and Ranging (ViDAR) array within the CarteNav AIMS mission system. The seamless incorporation of this world leading ViDAR technology into the AIMS system is a meaningful complement to the capability of the PAL aircraft that will serve this contract. ViDAR is a wide area optical search system capable of operation unaffected by environmental marine obstacles, such as whitecaps, which detrimentally affect traditional technologies.

The system is unique in its ability to detect objects as small as fishing buoys and people in the water over significant areas, allowing aircraft operators to map vast swaths of the ocean in real time. ViDAR autonomously locates objects on the surface of the water, transmits a thumbnail and location coordinate back to the AIMS mission system and prompts the operator to investigate further.

“Sentient was excited to work with CarteNav on the integration of ViDAR into the AIMS mission system to support this important contract,” said Simon Olsen, Sentient’s Director of Business Development, Strategy and Partnerships. “Blending these leading edge technologies into a combined offering marks a significant step forward and will now provide a game changing ocean surface search solution to the Government of Canada.”

Both ViDAR and AIMS have extensive records of accomplishment and are in operation on multiple continents across multiple environments in both military and civilian application.

“CarteNav has worked successfully with Sentient for many years, originally on the implementation of the Kestrel Moving Target Indicator (MTI) feature into AIMS, and most recently on integrating ViDAR,” said CarteNav COO Carl Daniels. “AIMS provides an intuitive interface from which operators can take advantage of the capabilities of the ViDAR persistent wide-area maritime search. The addition of ViDAR reaffirms our focus on operator workflow and mission delivery which has established CarteNav as a leader in mission system solutions.”

CarteNav’s collaboration with Sentient and valued contribution to the winning PAL bid demonstrates a significant combined operating capacity to deliver leading edge services to customers for a variety of maritime surveillance applications.

The successful execution of this contract on behalf of the Government of Canada fortifies CarteNav and Sentient’s shared credentials in this area and should open the door to capture additional, mutually beneficial opportunities in the future.