Army Aviation Situational Awareness Through Intelligent Agent-Based Discovery, Propagation, and Fusion of Information

The Army Aviation community is promoting the development of technologies and systems that support effective on-themove command of airborne and ground-based maneuver forces through shared situation awareness and decision aiding technologies. The operational concepts for these technologies and systems are characterized by the extensive use of mobile sensing systems, unmanned platforms, and decision aiding systems in the forward elements of the combat force, with the goal of providing mobile commanders with the improved situational awareness that results from a shared common operational picture of the battlefield. In support of these objectives, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL), under contract to the Army, is combining three ATL-developed technologies, Multi-Sensor Data Fusion, Intelligent Information Agents, and the Grapevine information sharing architecture, in an innovative way to provide the Shared Situation Awareness capability for ongoing Army programs in this area. In this paper, we describe the three technologies, their application in current and future work, and present results of simulation testing showing the benefits of Grapevine-enabled Distributed Data Fusion.