Unmanned Aircraft System Operator Training with ASTi

I/ITSEC 2015 | What's New

A new training game for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) is being developed by the U.S. Army Research Institute along with industry partners Aptima Inc., ASTi, KINEX and Imprimis Inc. The Night Vision Tactical Trainer-Shadow (NVTT-Shadow) game is designed to strengthen UAS operator communications and coordination skills for Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) operations.

ASTi's contribution to NVTT-Shadow's development includes advanced speech recognition, synthetic speech generation and radio communications simulation. These capabilities will allow UAS trainees to practice and refine critical communication skills via self-guided training modules without needing instructors, pilots or other role players to contribute to their training sessions.

Our context-aware recognition software translates student speech and passes meaningful data to Aptima's Performance Measurement (PM) Engine to measure the accuracy of students' communications and provide real-time scoring and feedback. ASTi's role in this program helps reduce cost to the U.S. Army training commands by automating routine tasks and reducing the manpower required to provide effective and efficient training.

Throughout the course of game development, ASTi has worked closely with subject matter experts (SMEs) and program partners to produce highly accurate and powerful voice-enabled interactions with constructive entities. These are modeled by the Army's One Semi-Automated Forces (OneSAF) game engine and our software contributes additional communications behaviors where applicable.

The NVTT-Shadow training application has been successfully demonstrated and is scheduled for evaluation by the 2nd Battalion, 13th Aviation Regiment at Ft. Huachuca, AZ.

Contact us to talk about how speech recognition and advanced behavior modeling with voice-enabled, intelligent agents can benefit your training and simulation application.

Shadow UAS landing at Camp Buehring in Kuwait
Photo: Spc. Andrew Ingram, 1st BCT, 4th Inf. Div.