Creating a Real Environment

Written by Pater Buxbaum

The mission rehearsal vision: that technology could advance beyond training simulation—focused on developing a skill set—to provide warfighters with realistic preparation for actual missions in specific locations. The easiest part of that task was to provide bird’s-eye views of real-world terrain for pilots and operators of unmanned aerial vehicles. They don’t need the kind of image fidelity and resolution that depicts every blade of grass on the ground.

It becomes much more difficult once ground troops demand realistic portrayals of the topology they will be traversing, the buildings they will be penetrating, and even the people they will be encountering. “Units want a high level of fidelity in their mission rehearsal systems,” said U.S. Marine Corps Major C. Neil Fitzpatrick, simulation officer at the 29 Palms Battle Simulation Center, Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command. “They want to walk the ground before they get in country.”

Unlike training system requirements, the environments created for mission rehearsal must be real. “The terrain in training environments can be notional. It doesn’t have to be a real place on Earth,” said Warren Katz, chief executive officer of VT MÄK. “All you’re trying to do is to create an intuitive response in the student to a set of standard stimuli. For mission rehearsal you need an exact representation of the environment the warfighter will find. If a certain aspect of the environment is important, it can’t be missing.”

“Mission rehearsal for a long time was highly rationed and only delivered to the special operations communities because the costs were so high they were almost prohibitive,” said Don Ariel, chairman and chief strategy officer of Raydon Corp.

CBD

Mission rehearsal is now becoming more generally available thanks to a number of developments. One of these, the common database (CDB), was originally developed by U.S. Special Operations Command but which is now being more widely exploited.

“Special operations needed a way to create a synthetic environment to distribute imagery through all simulation systems,” said Nick Giannias, vice president for research and technology at Presagis. “One of the challenges was that each system used different database standards. The CDB centralizes all synthetic environment information into the same format.”

Innovations in combat gaming have also allowed simulations to become more realistic. “Three-dimensional rendering has become inexpensive now,” said Katz. “Some of the underlying gaming technologies have helped improve mission rehearsal simulation.”

These include modules that allow for the easy insertion and recycling of objects and effects, such as light and shadow, in the simulation.

The trend toward the development of deterministic, as contrasted with stochastic, gaming, has also allowed simulations to become more realistic. “Deterministic systems include truer presentations of the physics involved and more accurately represents military planning,” said Matthew Denney, the U.S. Marine Corps program manager for training systems.

Deterministic systems will take into account rules of engagement that might require, for example, a specific clearance from an aircraft before an artillery round can be fired.

One gaming developer has managed to adapt a commercial ground combat computer game into a widely used mission rehearsal application almost off the shelf. Virtual Battle Space 2 (VBS2) was originally developed in 2005 as a game called Operation Flashpoint by Bohemia Interactive, and has since been re-purposed as a mission rehearsal tool. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps have purchased enterprise licenses for the product, said Stacy Elliott, the company’s U.S. business development director. The U.S. Navy also uses the game to prepare special operations forces for missions.

VBS2 is a first-person simulation, meaning that it presents the action from the shooter’s, rather than a bird’s-eye, point of view. “We added a feature called after-action review, which is not included in the commercial game,” said Elliott. “We also added the ability to simulate military command and control systems directly from the game.”

For mission rehearsal, the product brings in real-world, geospecific terrain data, another feature missing from the commercial product. “The terrain data at this point is all from open sources,” including commercial providers and government agencies, said Elliott. “Users are able to access the database and get what they need.”

VBS2 also includes a number of nonkinetic war fighting tasks such as interrogating prisoners and running “presence patrols,” which take assessments of the mood of the local population. “But it is best suited for kinetic fights between two opposing forces,” said Elliott. “You shoot me; I shoot you.”

MISSING PIECE

What is lacking in VBS2 and other similar products is the ability to pull necessary terrain imagery from a database on demand. “The way it works now is that if you need more terrain data, you have to stop the simulation and pull more out of the database,” said Elliott.

The continued development of the Command Data Base and the adaptation of commercial sources of geospatial data to mission rehearsal are two developments that aim to tackle this type of problem. The CDB provides a specification on how to use data in a common industry format, explained Presagis’ Giannias, so that various mission rehearsal simulation clients can retrieve information concurrently to perform simulation tasks.

CDB will also help in the generation of simulators that can portray complex terrains such as urban environments, according to Giannias. “In CDB you can get an agreement on how buildings are referenced and how interiors of buildings are described,” he said. “You want to make sure that the specification describes these environments in all their richness.”

Presagis, which makes tools that generate content for simulation and visualization products, has seen the value of the CDB approach in the development of its own products, according to Giannias. “We have a vision for how our products will work together through CDB to move data back and forth very quickly and to resolve the problems associated with the translations of data formats as data is moved from one database to another,” he said.

Giannias also foresees CDB emerging as a potential global specification for the storage of simulator data. The militaries in the United Kingdom and Germany are looking at the CDB specification for the creation of a common synthetic environment. These developments suggest the possibility of using the CDB for coordinated coalition mission rehearsals.

The availability of open source terrain data, from commercial and government sources, is about to engender a “revolutionary disruption” in the mission rehearsal model, according to Katz.

In the early states of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, “getting source data from the federal government was highly restricted,” said Ariel. “You couldn’t give it to your partners without an act of Congress.” Nowadays, Raydon’s database includes over 200,000 separate buildings. “That is mind boggling considering where we started,” said Ariel.

Katz’s predicted transformation is coming, he said, because simulators can now access data directly from geospatial information systems (GIS) and without conversion into a particular system format.

“This involves leapfrogging GIS data directly into the simulation,” said Katz. “There is no need to wait to put the data into a terrain database. This provides command and control with the most up-to-date information on the battlefield. If something has been blown up, it’s no longer there. If you need to run a mission tomorrow morning you need the data in the system instantly.”

VT MÄK’s latest products can use streaming elevation and imagery data directly from Web-mapping services hosted by Yahoo, Google and other unrestricted sources.

For all of the effort at portraying realistic geographies in mission rehearsal systems, one question still remains: whether the simulation can actually prepare warfighters for an error-free mission.

For Denney’s money, aviation applications still get the best bang for the buck. “They have a limited sphere of control, and they don’t have a thousand guys to coordinate,” he said.

But chaos ensues once forces are engaged on the ground. “That is where simulations fall apart,” Denney said. ♦

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