16 Jun 03. Hai Ben-Israel, President and CEO of Tadiran Electronic Systems explained to BATTLESPACE that the Man-Pack Receiving System MRS-2000 is being developed to support the control of Unmanned Vehicles (UV) rather than simply receive information from platforms as has been the case until now. This will give to system an uplink and enable the system to also function as a UV ground control system. There has been no increase in weight or form factor because of miniaturisation in the standard MRS system has provided the space for this growth. This upgrade has been developed to support the United States Marine Corps (USMC) Gladiator Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) programme. Team Excalibur which is constructing Gladiator is led by Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Consortium. The team comprises Tadiran Electronic Systems, Boeing, Timoney Technology and UQM Technologies. The $2.3m contract for Gladiator was awarded by the Office of Naval Research in May this year and a prototype is scheduled for delivery in 2006.
The USMC used the MRS-2000 system in operations in Iraq to receive information for Pioneer UAVs, recently transferred from the US Navy for the USMC’s bottom tier UAV ISTAR operations.
During Le Bourget, Ben Israel said, the United States Marine Corps had telephoned the company to inform them of a further orders for the system. The first MRS systems for service with the USMC were shipped in mid 2002.