The development and evaluation of new Armoured Fighting Vehicle (AFV) Fire Control System (FCS), Defensive Aids Suite (DAS), and Soldier-Machine Interface (SMI) technologies has traditionally been done on actual vehicles. However, the space and technological limitations of the host vehicle pose significant design constraints, the control of an actual turret and weapons impose costly qualification requirements, and field testing is costly and subject to the availability of suitable ranges and weather conditions. These constraints can be minimised by the use of a virtual environment.
The Advanced Land Fire Control System (ALFCS) is an R&D project to develop, integrate, and evaluate advanced FCS, DAS, and SMI technologies. Capabilities being developed and/or evaluated include automatic target detection and tracking, high-accuracy laser warning, automatic defence, data fusion and exploitation, multi-spectral counter-measures, advanced multi-function displays, reconfigurable controls, and simplified state and mode control.
To evaluate these and other AFV technologies, a virtual environment capable of hardware- and man-in-the-loop simulation was developed. This virtual environment, the Armoured Vehicle Test Bed (AVTB), includes a 6-DOF motion platform driven by sophisticated vehicle models, computer-generated visual and infrared imagery, accurate high-fidelity models of the environment, and models of the sensors and counter-measures required by the FCS and DAS. The entire system is re-configurable, facilitating investigations into alternate host vehicle configurations. The ALFCS project includes extensive design input and evaluation by current armoured vehicle crews. A four-build spiral development process is being used to integrate increasingly-complex systems.
The paper presents an overview of the technical details of the ALFCS virtual environment, and of the FCS, DAS, and SMI technologies under development and evaluation. It details the results of user and technical evaluations of the second of four builds of the project, including the integration of automatic target detection and a basic Defensive Aids Suite. The tactical use of a DAS is also discussed, including the results of a concurrent operational research study.