Eyeing a MOUT Advantage
Written by Tom Marlowe
MT2 2010 Volume: 15 Issue: 2 (April)
Military operations on urban terrain (MOUT) training technologies provide the U.S. military with the means to do that. Recent innovations in MOUT environments have provided the Army and Marine Corps with even greater realism and capabilities to train their soldiers and Marines.
Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) recently rolled out several improvements to MOUT systems, David Rees, SAIC senior vice president, told MT2. SAIC integrated an ultrawideband indoor tracking system from Ubisense into its MOUT configurations, as well as incorporating habitat units from Strategic Operations Inc.
“That provided the geophysical environment for the environment to exercise through, but it also allowed us to track them from outside, through the building, and onto the rest of the exercise. Rather than inventing new capabilities, our focus is really on taking the best of industry and building a team that really can deliver for the training environment,” Rees explained.
“Each of the technologies is already out there as a stand-alone technology. What we are really bringing to the game that’s new is integrating them into a complete training experience. Using standard equipment, you can dive off the back of your vehicle, hit the building clearly, and go back through again. Everything is captured in the common environment,” he said. “It makes for a much more fluid training environment than what we have had in the past.”
It’s important to make the training environment as convincing as possible for the user in order to prepare them for the life-and-death situations they face in the battlefield, Rees said. To do that, the equipment used in the training environment must be invisible to the trainee, while the environment must be as realistic as possible.
SAIC seeks to achieve those goals through greater integration of technologies that add more capabilities, Rees noted.
The company also has developed its Mini-Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (MILES) to make combat training even more realistic. Mini-MILES kits fit on warfighters’ sidearms to simulate firing of the weapon without any modification of the gun. With Mini-MILES, soldiers can identify and engage targets as they normally would in the field.
Mini-MILES fits into a barrel insert and works with legacy systems while integrating with current training ranges. In the future, SAIC would like to extend its MOUT and Mini-MILES capabilities to more weapons, winning more customers, Rees said.
“Our purpose here is about training to use lethal force in whatever context,” Rees commented. “So the more that we can find opportunities to provide people with that simulated experience before they enter the real situation, the better for them and the better for the departments they are operating in. It’s not just the conventional, heavy Army forces that have these training requirements. It’s surprisingly pervasive these days. We are looking at other venues as well.”
REALISTIC ENVIRONMENTS
Creating an urban terrain that appears realistic can be complicated and expensive, but companies like Presagis are working to simplify the process and costs of providing realistic training.
The Presagis product line falls into three broad categories of content creation, simulation and visualization, Robert Kopersiewich, vice president and general manager of embedded graphics, told MT2.
Under content creation, its Terra Vista and Creator applications create 3-D objects such as buildings and vehicles for trainees in virtual environments. For simulation, Presagis provides tools like AI.implant and Stage to train behaviors and provide training scenarios with a degree of artificial intelligence. Regarding visualization, Presagis offers its Vega Prime application for rendering an environment for objects to inhabit.
Presagis has added capability to the individual applications to make them highly useful in MOUT environments, Kopersiewich said.
“For Creator, we have invested heavily in the tool to allow customers to model building interiors to a high level of detail, whether you need staircases, furniture or other objects,” Kopersiewich said of content creation. “We have really enhanced the tool to create the building interiors that customers demand for MOUT applications.”
The company’s AI.implant application has brought a new level of capability to simulation because it can assign behaviors to objects to make the training environment even more realistic.
“AI.implant is our artificial intelligence software tool. People use it to assign synthetic brains to entities. The tool is used to define how entities will react to different stimuli—different inputs from the user or different inputs from other entities. It’s a very critical piece of technology,” Kopersiewich commented. “It could be vehicles, it could be animals or it could be people. It could be any entity that requires some form of behavior.”
Presagis recently began to focus on the integration of the various products into an interoperable suite known as Aeria.
“It integrates the tools so that intelligence from AI.implant is aware of the environment coming directly from Creator. From a user perspective, they have things like shared menus and shared technology across the tools, where they can quickly and easily create the 3-D environment and assign behaviors to the entities that live, if you will, in that 3-D environment,” Kopersiewich revealed.
“Ultimately, we are moving toward making this seamless for the user to be able to create the environment, assign the behaviors, and visualize end to end in a way that is very easy and routine,” he continued.
Presagis prides itself on offering commercial- off-the-shelf solutions that require no modification to provide instant utility. As such, its software is popular among military agencies as well as commercial contractors.
An Israeli company called b.design has used the Presagis applications to create very detailed databases for MOUT applications, for example. The company won recognition from Presagis last year for creating best-in-class content for contractors or government agencies to use in MOUT scenarios.
“COTS tools once were very much focused on a specific piece of the application. Presagis has the dominant market share in these areas, so we are able to bring it to another level. With Aeria, we are focusing on making it seamless for the customer,” Kopersiewich said.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
When warfighters enter any battle scenario, commanders strive to keep track of their forces. Traditional battlefield warfare allows the use of the global positioning system (GPS) for blue force tracking, but urban environments interfere with GPS signals.
That’s why Saab Training developed an instrumented training system to track warfighters in urban training environments and thus overcome the limitations of GPS.
“It’s MILES-based training, but ours is instrumented. Every player has a radio that communicates to a base station. Every player has the ability to determine his or own GPS location. They know exactly what is happening on the battlefield,” Ken Polczynski, business development manager at Saab Training, told MT2.
“With the GPS constellation, once you go indoors in a MOUT environment, you lose the GPS. It’s very difficult to stay connected to it. So Saab has devised a way to do synthetic GPS, so when you go into MOUT, wireless battery operated sensors let each player know where they are relative to the playing field,” he added. “It’s very exciting and very realistic.”
The Marine Corps was so impressed with the system that it awarded Saab Training with its Instrumented-Tactical Engagement Simulation System (I-TESS) contract in April 2009, to provide Marines with a modular and mobile integrated range instrumentation system that utilizes laser simulators, exercise control, battle tracking, data collection and instant after-action reviews (AARs).
By the end of 2010, Saab training will provide the I-TESS training capabilities to four Marine base locations, including Marine Corps Base Quantico, the Marine Basic School, Camp Pendleton and Camp Lejeune. This year, the Marines issued a second order to bring I-TESS to the Marine Corps Training Center at Twentynine Palms.
The system uses a base station that ties players together through radios. The system can track who shoots whom, how they were shot, where they were shot, and other details in its simulated fire environment. “You get to see the entire picture,” Polczynski described. “As a trainer or a troop leader, you get to watch it unfold as it happens. You could stop at any point to bring your leaders together and say, look, this is what you did, this is how you reacted, this is what you did correctly and this is what you could improve.”
Trainers can conduct AARs in real-time but can also arrange a formal AAR after the exercise. I-TESS can create take-home packages so units can return to their home base and review their performance at their convenience.
In the future, Saab Training is interested in adding more simulated munitions to its training capabilities. As the services introduce new aircraft or new bombs, Saab Training wants to be able to simulate them.
“For years, we have been working with the special operations forces,” Polczynski commented. “They play with the system extensively. Whether they want to call in an Apache gunship to provide close air support or they want to call in an AC-130 Specter gunship, they want the ability to play those munitions. So we are always looking to bring that new and relevant capability to the services.”
TIME, SPACE, POSITIONING INFORMATION
Saab Training is not the only company adept at locating trainees without GPS. Geodetics Inc. has introduced precision positioning solutions such as its Epoch-by-Epoch Network-Centric Positioning Unit (ENPU). Geodetics started out providing positioning software to civilian markets in 1999, but it quickly grew to produce turnkey solutions after intense interest from the U.S. military, Jeff Fayman, Geodetics vice president of business and product development, told MT2.
“The military customers were interested in turnkey solutions, so we started designing and building hardware for them that hosted our core technology and software. Now the company does full turnkey solutions for a variety of applications for the military,” Fayman recalled.
“The Army was interested in testing at the MOUT facilities and other installations. They needed instrumentation that was accurate to test the weapons systems that were coming into those facilities. They became aware of our technology for accurate positioning and they were interested in a small, man-worn device, which could be put on a soldier and allow for the accurate location of those soldiers while they were moving around,” he continued.
The ENPU is a small, fully contained sensor, which includes batteries, a radio frequency datalink and GPS sensors. A soldier would wear the ENPU, which is the hardware powered by the Epoch by Epoch software solution.
Geodetics tested the solution extensively at Fort Hood, Texas, for the Army to determine how well it worked in MOUT environments. The EPNU worked very well and now Army customers have purchased the units for use in MOUT, Fayman confirmed.
But Geodetics plans to continue to innovate and add more capability to track warfighters indoors. The goal is to provide the military with detailed time, space, positioning information, or TSPI, as accurately as possible.
“The military is looking for accurate TSPI,” Fayman elaborated. “That means they want to have the ability to locate anything they put a sensor on. With our ENPU units, they want to find out where that unit is as accurately as they can. When they talk about accuracy, they are talking about 30 or 40 cm [12 or 16 in]. So it needs to be very accurate.”
The military would like to collect TSPI information not only on soldiers, but tanks and aircraft as well, Fayman emphasized.
“This positioning capability is important to the military for the entire range of military assets that are moving. Geodetics is a company that has technology that is designed specifically for very accurate positioning of moving platforms. So it fits very well and it’s able to measure the position of platforms,” he stated.
MEN IN MOTION
While new technologies have brought unparalleled sophistication to MOUT environments, what if a trainee could walk into a training environment without wearing any sensors at all and simply react naturally to his surroundings? Organic Motion has made some breakthroughs in doing exactly that with its OpenStage platform, CEO Andrew Tschesnok told MT2.
“In the military, there is a lot of interest in various programs to understand what a person is doing in a facility or in a room, and to do that without having to attach any devices to the soldier and do it in ways that currently aren’t being done,” Tschesnok observed.
GPS signals have trouble tracking people in buildings, but so do some other solutions such as tagging with radio frequency identification (RFID), Tschesnok said. Metal objects or metal walls inside of buildings can interfere with the accuracy of RFID. But Organic Motion has been working on the challenge of getting computers to see people through cameras and then react to their presence or actions.
“We think the future will greatly benefit from the idea that you attach cameras to a computer and those cameras can optically see and understand what people are doing in various environments. Then a whole bunch of new applications can fit on top of that,” Tschesnok commented.
Organic Motion has made great strides in meeting that challenge for clients such as gaming companies and universities. But the military, which truly introduced simulation applications to the world at large, has faced obstacles with evolving the technology beyond vehicle simulators and into simulation for individual dismounted soldiers, Tschesnok said, which is exactly where Organic Motion provides some exciting possibilities.
“If you have video requirements where an operator can see into every room, we are looking to hook our system into that. Without practically any additional hardware, we could do the tracking as well, based optically on the equipment that is on the room. We could do X and Y position tracking from the video information on the camera,” Tschesnok said.
This way, operators can digitally view what is occurring in various rooms and track people within them. At present, a fully functional solution requires a lot of cameras, but the company is working on reducing the number of cameras necessary in a setup. More cameras also provide greater detail in current MOUT environments.
“We can do a lot more than just position information. Right now, the minimum requirement is a position within a meter or so of space. What if you wanted to know more? Like what direction is their gun pointed? What direction are they looking at? Are they kneeling? Are they standing? Are they on the ground?” Tschesnok noted.
Organic Motion is presently working with a major defense contractor to incorporate Open Stage into a major demonstration of new MOUT capabilities and perhaps a future contract. The companies plan demonstrations of those capabilities in the coming months, Tschesnok revealed. ♦