Emerging From The Ice Box

Marty Kauchak, MS&T Group Editor, and MS&T Editor Rick Adams engaged with a diverse group of exhibitors on the conference floor on Day Three.

AI Body launched its business in 2020 and “emerged from the icebox of the last 20 or so months,” according to Richard Littlehales, the company’s CEO said. He initially emphasized, “We’re not talking about a mannequin for training,” then presented the science base for his AI Body platform and noted what differentiates this product from other technology offerings in this space. AI Body is reported to be “the world’s only complete Digital Human Organism built-up from the sub-cellular level, with the company’s unique approach making it possible for all interrelated biophysical, physiological and biochemical processes to occur concurrently in a simulation, in real-time. Our physiology platform is modelled from the sub-cellular (biochemistry) level up, with the physiology platform accessible through the Cloud.” The product’s underpinnings also include prolonged field care scenarios, permitting the learner to manage single or multiple casualty situations for virtual patients at decision points laid out on a managed timeline. Unity is an industry partner, helping the company gamify scenarios for increased fidelity, with AI Body further configured to integrate augmented reality. Prospective end-users include the defense community, healthcare organizations, and emergency responders, with medical device companies having the potential to be partners.

Despite the Covid pandemic, Saab Training and Simulation is experiencing a surge of contracts and business across its expanding portfolio, with strong demand specifically in Sweden, Europe and the US. A snapshot of its US-based growth: its newly established Advanced Systems division in West Lafayette, Indiana will be responsible for providing assembly of the aft fuselage of the T-7A Red Hawk – starting in 2022 – for further delivery to and system installation at Boeing in St. Louis. The US Air Force will train more than 1,000 fighter and bomber pilots per year in T-7As. The Red Hawk is planned to be in operation in 2024. About 350 T-7A Red Hawks are in the USAF program of record.

Another attention-getter for Saab is more than 35,000 training devices are in service across the US DoD. That amount may soon significantly increase by way of the US Marine Corps Force-on-Force Training Systems-Next program. Saab was selected last June to provide live training equipment, logistics and training exercise support at USMC sites in the US and overseas. Johnathan Slater, Vice President and General Manager, Land Systems, noted the program’s potential contract value is $US 127.9 million. He added, “This is still in negotiations. We expect to have the contract definitized this mid-February [2022].”

Elsewhere in the ground training space, InVeris Training Solutions unveiled SRCE (See, Rehearse, Collectively Experience), an augmented reality-based, untethered weapons training simulator. Darren Shavers, Director for Business Development/FMS Virtual/LF Systems at the company, told MS&T AR is used as an enabler as it allows the trainee to see all parts of the weapon and then immerse him/herself in assembly and other weapon operations. While the simulator’s visual system currently limits it to indoor operations, the scope of missions is soon expected to expand to outdoors. AI is envisioned to be integrated into the simulator in 2022. While the initial roll-out target learning audience is currently the military, ‘Source’ is envisioned to expand to law enforcement.

Tobii Pro’s wearable eye-tracking portfolio continues to expand. In one instance, under the guidance of Amanda Bentley, Director of Sales and Marketing, Specialty Markets, MS&T had an opportunity to wear and examine Tobii Pro Glasses 3. The device delivered comprehensive and reliable eye-tracking data in several scenarios with the intended end user in diverse training and education settings. Tobii is also enabling virtual training in the commercial aviation market. Of interest to readers of companion publication CAT, Tobii is integrated into VTR’s Flight Deck to Go.

Raashi Quattlebaum, Vice President of F-35 Training and Logistics, and retired US Navy fighter pilot Erik “Rock” Etz, Senior Manager of New Business, Strategy and Roadmaps at Lockheed Martin, provided an overview of the company’s F-35 Mission Rehearsal Trainer (MRT) – Lightning Integrated Training Environment (LITE). The OEM is on the fast track to offer its US and non-US partner customers a reduced footprint solution to train pilots with 5th Generation fighter Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. MRT-LITE is said to provide a 90% reduced hardware footprint over the current full mission simulator, or in another context, eight MRT-LITE devices fit within the facility space allocation of a single FMS. BugEye is a key LM industry supplier (cockpit) for this new training device, which is envisioned to take advantage of existing Distributed Mission Training technology and connect with the existing family of F-35 Pilot Training Devices. Indeed, MRT-LITE utilizes advanced technology enabling mission rehearsal and tactics development for 8-ship (+) operations in high-end training scenarios. The training audience can complete 75% of FMS Training Task List items in MRT-LITE. The training device’s roadmap for 2022 includes integration of a classified version, the addition of enabling HMDs, and other outcomes.

Forget small unit live training involving soldier-on-soldier and other limited scenarios. UK-based Improbable is doing nothing less than kicking down the door and inserting networking to dramatically increase the number of players in a scenario. Anna Loske, Senior Marketing Manager, noted its platform could conceptually train larger echelons – about 5,000 connected users – larger than a US Army brigade. To that end, Loske noted Improbable also uses AI- generated actors, coupled with physics-based capabilities – all scalable – to provide defense or other organization with the capability to learn and rehearse missions along the lines of peacekeeping and even containing and responding to pandemics and other high-order threats.

Vertex Solutions is a prime contractor and lead technology integrator on the USAF’s Pilot Training Transformation (PTT) program, overseen jointly by the USAF Air Education and Training Command (AETC), 19 AF, and the interservice Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). “It's not just that we can build a new flight simulator and put VR software on it; it's that we can do it in a scalable way, do it securely so it follows all of the Air Force-required DOD risk management framework requirements etc, and we interconnect that with a broad Air Force-wide Cloud architecture,” Vertex CTO Andrew Palla told MS&T. “Simultaneous to the pilot training transformation technology program is the Air Force's development to roll out UPT 2.5, the undergraduate pilot training curriculum, so it's not just the technology, it's the enabling approach.”

Palla also showed us their first-of-its-kind mixed reality MK 16 Underwater Breathing Apparatus Simulator (UBASim), developed for the US Navy Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC). The UBASim system allows Navy divers and EOD techs for the first time to realistically and safely train MK 16 operations and emergency procedures. It combines custom physical components and complex physics modeling with immersive VR environments and an intelligent tutor to maximize training effectiveness and increase diver safety and operational performance. “If you've seen the Robert De Niro - Cuba Gooding Jr. movie (Men of Honor), the user for this training program is the modern-day equivalent of the De Niro character, the chief master diver,” noted Palla. “They use a breather system, not scuba; there's actually a container that they're breathing into and out that lets them dive longer, dive deeper, but it's a very unforgiving system so faults can happen with that system – it's very complicated, and if one of those faults occurs and you do not recognize it immediately and act accordingly there have been and will continue to be fatalities.”

Hadean, a five-year-old company exhibiting for the first time at I/ITSEC, showed us how their Aether Engine can enable large simulation scaling by breaking computationally intensive areas into smaller cells. An example demo was, appropriate for this timeframe, emergency response to a virus pandemic spread. “We subdivide the city into regions; each one is essentially running as separate process, running on a different computer in the Cloud. The size of the region depends on the number of entities,” explained Richard Edwards, Head of Marketing.

The London, UK company started life in the games industry with notable MMOG’s such as Minecraft. An Epic MegaGrant supports their move into other domains, i.e. virtual events, healthcare, and defense, including Microsoft and CAE as customers.