Law Enforcement

Customers at every level of law enforcement use ARS — from municipal police, to state highway patrols, to Federal customers both at home and abroad.  With unsurpassed country to continent-wide street and business information, unlimited parcel data, support for 3D synthetic imagery, geopointing, and outstanding accuracy, ARS is your best choice for a mission management system today.

Designed by law enforcement for law enforcement, ARS has a variety of features designed to help ensure the bad guys go behind bars.  When you arrive on scene, you’ll know the exact address of every house you are looking at — if someone jumps a fence into a backyard, you’ll know the address before their feet hit the ground.

Unique features designed for surveillance include our proprietary 3D compass that allows you to accurately estimate feature sizes, and information regarding not just the nearest street, but the nearest cross-street on the street.

For patrol operations, this helps you get cars where you need the and for surveillance work, it ensures your vehicles are out of sight but exactly where they need to be.

Fire & Forestry Management

In the summer of 2010, Churchill Navigation performed flight tests to determine the applicability of ARS to quickly and accurately determine the location of “hot spots” – areas that remain after a forest fire that have the potential to flare up again.  The pilot’s comments were:

“With your system we were able to stay at 1000′, maintain 25 to 30 knots and the camera operator would point the gimbal down at 65 degree’s while marking the spots. The results were well within the needed 10 meters accuracy. The time needed to mark 7 hot spots was approximately 30 to 40 seconds as compared to the regular way of 5 minutes per spot times 7 = 35 minutes. All the time well above the dead man’s curve.”

Pilot – Boulder County Sheriff

“The savings in helicopter times would more than offset the costs of the ARS and not missing some or counting a spot twice is a money saver also.”

Pilot – Boulder County Sheriff

ARS can also be used to produce fire perimeter shapefiles for use with traditional GIS packages such as ESRI ArcInfo. It provides a robust set of drawing and editing tools that can operate on live video and can export the resulting data in the geographic projection of your choice.

Search and Rescue

You aren’t flying sight-seeing tours in Hawaii.  When you get called, all too often the weather is closing in and it’s life or death for someone out there.

ARS is the right tool to help you get the job done.  Because if it was us out there, this is what we’d want you to have.

Offering nationwide enhanced USGS topographic maps, the complete set of several thousand NOAA Digital Nautical Charts, all of the FAA Sectional and Terminal Area Charts, trail overlays, and much more, we offer the most comprehensive and highest quality set of maps available from anyone, anywhere.

Every ARS system includes nationwide high resolution terrain and continent-wide street data, as well as the ability to search more points of interest than all other airborne mapping systems combined: national and global data sets of trail-heads, mountain summits, airstrips, lakes, and much more are all provided with every system.

Saving lives doesn’t just happen —  It requires having the right tools.  Your infrared camera and aircraft are part of the equation; ARS is the other part.

Electronic News Gathering
& TV News

The unrivaled vantage point provided by airborne video has become the standard for major Electronic News Gathering (ENG) and TV news organizations worldwide. However, without familiar landmarks, addresses, or even street names, airborne shots often lack context, making it difficult for viewers to relate to what they are seeing… Until now.

Churchill Navigation’s Augmented Reality Mapping System for Broadcast, BEAR, gives airborne video relevancy and relatability by overlaying the information essential for building context. Streets, addresses, businesses, and much more can be shown directly onto the aircraft’s live broadcast feed. Now, viewers can know exactly where news is taking place and quickly determine how it impacts them.

Whether covering car chases, fires, traffic, natural disasters, or any other type of breaking news, augmented reality mapping provides viewers with an unmatched level of immersion.

BEAR gives operators the capability to search for any address, intersection, business, or point-of-interest and automatically slew the camera to that location with the touch of a button. This allows the ENG aircraft and its crew to be more efficient when on scene, adding another compelling dimension to what BEAR can do when in the trained hands of law enforcement, fire fighters, or now, journalists.

“I mean it is mind blowing what this can do.”  — KWTV chief meteorologist David Payne.

Military

The Churchill Navigation ARS system is a TRL 9 flight proven Mission Management System able to be easily customized to interface to a wide range of equipment, signals and to display necessary information for the latest in situational awareness and decision making.

The system includes high resolution imagery, DTED data, 3D map imagery, inclusion of NIMA and NGA data and can display a wide range of geo-located points be that various targets, refuel locations, areas of interest, or friendly or not so friendly forces.

ARS overlays information such as ADS-B traffic locations, weather, RADAR targets, and BFT icons on top of real time EO/IR video, giving users selectable and accurate layers of data to aid in split second decision making.

All information can be presented and controlled from a single screen saving reducing space, weight and power (SWAP) and keeping the operator focused on the target.

UAS and Optionally Piloted Aircraft

Utilizing a bidirectional data-link the ARS system can be installed in the UAS/UAV and controlled from the ground. The system can be used to steer the camera to specific locations.

The video and information can be recorded and down-linked back to the ground for up to the minute analysis and review. The entire mission can be controlled and reviewed from an operational command center, on-ground.

Other Applications