Live Virtual Constructive
The Department of Defense is under considerable pressure to extend the service life of the existing aircraft fleet. At the same time, the current fleet is stretched thin by theater operation demands and increased demand from initial and recurrent training.
LVC is an integration concept that incorporates live, virtual, and constructive elements into a single environment, to leverage the best of each domain to minimize logistics and maximize training effectiveness. LVC can connect geographically distributed airborne, ground, and ship-borne assets into a single net-centric training exercise. The integration of virtual and constructive elements into live training not only opens up new training avenues, but also raises concerns about flight safety as live aircraft trainees need to be able to differentiate between live and virtual entities and threats.
Avionics in modern multirole aircraft are very complex and capable. This new capability leads the deployment of aircraft in more and more complex engagements involving an ever-increasing number of distributed decision-makers. Crew readiness peaks during active deployment in theater when training opportunities are relatively abundant. For post-FRS crews, training opportunities are reduced and crew readiness is found to decline. The same problem of scarce training opportunities exists for Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) who interoperate with ground crews during close air support. LVC will enable JTACs in training to control live and virtual aircraft from decentralized locations such as the schoolhouse for training credit.
Cognitive Avionics Tool Set (CATS) Software
Current avionics are not aware of pilot workload. CATS gives avionics the ability to sense and adapt to situations of overload and underload. The development of Cognitive systems requires a physiological assessment capability able to measure a multitude of physiological parameters and to properly quantify external influences such as sustained accelerations, electromagnetic noise, illumination conditions, temperature fluctuations, and overall environment variables with a multi-sensory data fusion approach.
We have developed a hardware and software framework that we call the Cognitive Avionics Tool set (CATS), which is useful to developers of Cognitive systems. The CATS includes software modules that allow Cognitive sensor fusion, visualization, synchronization, artifact removal, querying, and classification of data that was collected in the context of physiological testing in real-time. The goal of CATS is to give the researcher a hand in organizing the mass quantities of data and provide an opportunity to focus on the scientific aspects of the data.
