The CPU will probably be destroyed by radiation before long. I'd guess the key factors here were weight, power draw, size and perhaps performance. A radiation-hardened CPU probably didn't fit the bill. It's also super expensive.
Any individual part is peanuts compared to overall mission cost. Anyway, it’s a great PR stunt for QCOM. It’s not that big secret, that cubesats successfully use automotive grade off shelf parts.
absolutely performance. Yes to the other three for sure, but the engineers reported that there was no way they were running flight control using image tracking on a 200MHz CPU.
Not in python, maybe. Smartbombs have been doing the necessary image processing with much less processing power, on much less capable sensors, for a long time.
Dunno about guided bombs, but cruise missiles have been using some pretty fascinating techniques to navigate before GPS was a thing. It's probably hard to find CPU specs, because they're defense technology.
It is surprisingly easy to find, as that stuff is pretty thoroughly covered in academic/industry journals. The only hinderance to access is a credit card number for the paywall.
The helicopter project is somewhere said to cost $80 million.
Would be interesting to know cost allocation for that Sony/Samsung chip. Project manager and scientists/engineers could have listed design challenges for industry player like TSMC/Apple go beat with an offering, a short run of 20 chips specifically for this helicopter.
What. I dont understand how you can make this claim. Guided bombs are NOT using CV with optical cameras. They use lasers, GPS, and other non "fancy" techniques.
I just don't get in what world you think military munitions are using CV for targeting bombs.
So I guess you've never heard of the AGM-62 Walleye, or anything else that came out of China Lake. Before you try backpedaling with some silly nonsense about how gating isn't real CV, maybe do a quick search through the journals that cover this stuff: aiaa would be a good start. Another path would be in relation to counter-counter-measures, and ground noise rejection for air-to-ground radar guided munitions. That stuff was deployed regularly all the way back to Vietnam.
The other poster mentions analog techniques used in contrast-tracking TV-guided munitions like the Walleye, but digital "CV-like" image/contour matching methods were used on the original Tomahawk cruise missile and the Pershing 2 missile to provide terrain-matching navigation and target guidance. GPS was neither sufficiently complete or accurate for strategic weapons in the late 1970s/early 1980s.
In more modern weapons, imaging IR sensors are well-established for terminal guidance on missiles like LRASM, JASSM, or NSM to distinguish targets from clutter and identify specific target features (specific parts of a ship, for example). Of course "traditional" "IR-homing" SAMs and AAMs now use imaging sensors (often with multiple modes like IR+UV) to distinguish between the target and decoys/jammers. Even your basic shoulder-fired anti-tank missile like Javelin requires some amount of CV to identify and track a moving target.
aka edge detection :) I don't remember if it was the Sidewinder or Walleye that eventually dropped in a CCD (or both), but I know that the Maverick (which is technically older than Walleye) got along without a CCD until the GWOT - when it finally upgraded. The Javelin actually beat Maverick in that regard, having a 64x64 sensor 10 years earlier - able to handle scaling and perspective change for the 2-d designated target pattern.
