Engineering at Cobham is all about innovation. And nowadays,
along with innovation, users want timely delivery of cost effective
solutions which will directly contribute to mission success. It's
the job of the Engineering team to come up with solutions to
problems which meet these criteria, make a difference to users and
a give a competitive advantage to both our company and our
customers. At Cobham, engineers have at their disposal a broad and
deep network of thinkers and doers to help generate and refine
powerful ideas and turn them into products that win in the
marketplace. We are not shy about issuing calls
throughout the corporation to elicit targeted expertise to help
solve particularly thorny problems. Corporate training and
enrichment programmes, such as LCM (Life Cycle Management) and DHP
(Development of High Potential), bring people from a great many
specialties and perspectives together to foster cross-fertilization
and community building.
Some innovations are extremely visible, while others are buried
deep in products which are destined to remain client company
secrets. Yet they all contribute to the success of the product
and the financial success of the customer. Much of the development
activity is undertaken behind closed doors but there is no greater
satisfaction than witnessing a product that delivers what's
required, whether it be saving lives or giving our end users that
all important edge.
For example, we pioneered a breakthrough solution to a
fundamental problem in using robots to neutralize roadside bombs.
Remote-controlled robots hunt for bombs with video cameras that
radio their imagery back to human operators in real time. In towns,
wideband radio signals develop profound distortion as they ricochet
randomly off building walls. Cobham's breakthrough development was
a line of especially compact COFDM (Coded Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiplexed) radios specifically designed to unscramble
the effects of signal ricochet and greatly extend the range of
bomb-hunting robots.