Current practices in team training rely either on coordinated scheduling of personnel local to a base or ship (which limits the availability, breadth, and consistency of training), or on TDY training at a dedicated facility (which presents few opportunities, risks rapid skill degradation, and incurs high costs). To overcome these limitations we are developing Synthetic Teammates for Realtime Anywhere Training and Assessment (STRATA). STRATA is supporting DARPA's Training Superiority ("DARWARS") program and its vision for persistent, on-demand distributed mission training. STRATA integrates several innovative technologies that, for the first time, allow users to interact in challenging, engaging scenarios with distributed human and synthetic players, executing realistic missions at varying challenge levels. Our goal is to achieve considerable improvement in user performance by combating skill decay, to afford on-demand practice of both individual and team-level skills, and to provide tools that enable designers to create innovative training that is fully deployable with minimal equipment requirements.

A central feature of STRATA is the use of intelligent, interactive synthetic teammates that communicate verbally with users and exhibit realistic task and team behaviors. STRATA also affords instructor-optional training, through the use of advanced capabilities for automated mission briefing, individual and team performance measurements, and automated after-action review (AAR). STRATA is being demonstrated in the context of Close Air Support training. More broadly, the combined capabilities of synthetic teammates and automated instruction affords team training that is truly on-demand.