In order to train war fighters for urban warfare, live exercises are held at various MOUT facilities. Commanders and instructors need to have situation awareness of the entire mock battlefield, and also the individual actions of the various war fighters. The commanders and instructors must be able to provide instant feedback and play through different actions and 'what-if' scenarios with the war fighters. The warfighters in turn should be able to review their actions and rehearse various maneuvers. The system must be able to automatically score the performance of the warfighters and provide them an assessment of their performance.
In this paper, we describe the technologies behind a prototype training system, which tracks and automatically assesses performance of war fighters around an urban site using a combination of ultra-wideband RFID, INS pose, trigger sensor and smart video based tracking. The system is able to:
1. Tag each individual with a unique ID using an RFID system.
2. Track and locate an individual's position, head pose and weapon pose within the domain of interest at all times during an exercise.
3. Associate IDs with visual appearance derived from live videos.
4. Visualize movement and actions of individuals within the context of a 3D model.
5. Store and review activities with (x, y, head pose, weapon pose, gun-trigger, ID) information associated with each individual.
6. Automatically create events and performance metrics for each warfighter. These events are stored in a database. User can click on an event and see the associated video.
An ontology is used to represent the expert knowledge for MOUT training. Using this ontology, the tracks are analyzed, performance metrics and events are automatically created. The metrics of a novice can be compared with the metrics of an expert and overall performance of each soldier can be automatically assessed and measured with each exercise.
Dynamic acquisition and recording of the precise location of individual troops and units during training greatly aids the analysis of the training sessions allowing improved review, critique and instruction.
The prototype training system has been used for simulated Marine Corps exercises and shown improved training efficiency and effectiveness.