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UAVPlot: Augmenting Traditional Situation Awareness Displays with UAS Data By Kevin Forbes As unmanned aircraft systems proliferate within the military and access to their data among warfighters increases, managing and coordinating these systems and their information will become increasingly difficult. Effective use of that sensor data will only be possible if the warfighter knows the information is available, can get access to the information, and can use the information in conjunction with the resources at hand. MITRE has been working on all three of these information challenges. Under the sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research and the Marine Corps Systems Command, the Strike Cell Project has been investigating ways to integrate two pieces of data—status and sensor information. The goal is to increase efficiency and decrease the cognitive load by providing the warfighter with a seamless, single view of the battlefield that merges traditional situation awareness data with data received from unmanned aircraft.
Unmanned aircraft systems currently report their position, flight status/plans, tasking, and sensor information, such as live video and imagery pictures. The people in command and control centers who can access that data see it separately from their map-based situation awareness displays—the vitally important tool used to understand friendly and enemy force locations and other information describing the state of the battlefield. Currently, personnel have to move their attention away from their displays to view unmanned aircraft data and then must mentally fuse situational data and unmanned aircraft data, all without losing an overall understanding of the battlefield. With the Strike Cell-developed prototype called UAVPlot, command and control personnel will be able to view unmanned aircraft data right on their displays. UAVPlot provides unmanned aircraft locations and fields of view as part of the map-based data normally seen on the situation awareness displays (also called a common operational picture). Users of UAVPlot can see the current position of each unmanned aircraft, as well as the aircrafts' sensor fields of view, all superimposed on a representation of the battlefield. Thus users are able to understand where the aircraft need to move in order to report on such entities as suspicious or unidentified aircraft or ground vehicles. Users can also download and view images previously captured by the aircraft. UAVPlot also makes use of the Cursor on Target messaging technology developed by MITRE. From the Mouths of Soldiers The UAVPlot concept and prototype evolved out of dynamic simulation experiments that allow sponsors to explore and validate command and control capabilities under realistic conditions with active warfighters as operators. These operators provide their seasoned perspectives on future capabilities, concepts of operations, and the technologies that are used during the week-long war games. The initial version of UAVPlot is currently being transferred to the Marine Corps for incorporation into its Command and Control for the Personal Computer application. MITRE continues to evolve and explore the potential benefits of UAVPlot, working to incorporate Web-enabled intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data services in order to provide streaming video from unmanned aircraft directly into situation awareness/common operational picture displays. |
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| For more information, please contact Kevin Forbes using the employee directory. Page last updated: August 22, 2007 | Top of page |
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