Shared Situation Awareness For Army Applications June 2003

The real-time manned-unmanned teaming of on-the-move Army assets will provide mobile commanders and warfighters with improved situation awareness from the sharing and fusion of heterogeneous distributed data sources information. Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) is improving situation awareness through three ATL-developed technologies: adaptive, modular, multisensor information fusion; Grapevine agent-based intelligent data dissemination; and agent-based data discovery. These technologies address the three key challenges to shared situation awareness: how to consume data, when to disseminate data, and where to access data. In particular, these technologies focus on the general task of real-time distributed heterogeneous information fusion in highly dynamic ad hoc networked environments. In this paper we describe the three technologies that enable real-time manned-unmanned teaming for shared situation awareness, as well as active research and development of new algorithms and architectures for these technologies.