Products > Passive Optical Sensors > HSI Gimbals

Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) Gimbals

HSI Gimbals

PSI is developing a family of 5” gimbal payloads equipped with HSI sensors and broadband contextual cameras. The HSI payloads are designed to operate from small unmanned aircraft systems (SUAS). Current payload designs are pointed at integration with the SUAS Tactical Agile Gimbal (STAG) from Leonardo DRS, but the payload design is flexible, and can be adapted for any gimbal manufacture.

PSI’s HSI gimbal payloads break the interdependence between vehicle speed, frame rate, and spatial resolution of conventional push-broom systems and enables staring-mode operation without cooperative motion of the host vehicle or aircraft. The contextual camera and HSI components fit within 1000 cm3, weigh a total of 2.1 lbs., and draw 15 W of power. The sensor mechanical design is compatible with gimbal-based deployment allowing for easy integration into ground vehicles or aircrafts. Our gimbaled HSI sensors are optimized for target detection and tracking with dramatically reduced system size, weight, and power. Applications include small-unmanned aircraft system-based target detection and tracking for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for battlefield situational awareness, weapons crew targeting, and climate monitoring.

Key Features

We currently offer two HSI payloads, one operating in the Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) and one operating in the Long Wave Infrared (LWIR).

The SWIR Payload comes equipped with a mega-pixel CMOS color imager and an HSI sensor based on a Czerny-Turner spectrometer coupled with a digital micromirror device (DMD) that functions as a programmable entrance slit. The LWIR payload comes equipped with a lightweight FLIR BOSON microbolometer for high spatial resolution broadband thermal imager (TI) and a piezoelectric actuated Fabry-Perot etalon coupled to a FLIR Tau 2 to provide HSI data cubes. Both payloads come with on-board computing.

3D solid model of a PSI HSI payload integrated with the STAG platform

Benefit to Warfighter

PSI’ HSI gimbal payloads can be used to collect intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information from air assets in order to:

Detect camouflage and decoys
Detect, locate, identify, and track critical targets
Identify chemical threats.

In the commercial space, the HSI payloads have direct utility towards diverse remote sensing applications such as vegetation monitoring, geological mapping, surveillance, etc.