HSToday
October 28, 2008
http://www.hstoday.us/content/view/5806/27/

Getting Real Results with Virtual Training
By Hank Hogan

Michael Tremlett, director of the center for team performance for Dynamics Research Corp. (DRC) of Andover, Mass., sees parallels between a combat team and an emergency response group. Both involve cells of people who have to stand up quickly and deal with what may be a rapidly evolving situation. It places a premium on certain skills.

“You have to able to effectively understand how to communicate and coordinate with each other,” noted Tremlett.

Fortunately, technology has made the task of training for such situations easier. Complicated scenarios and equipment can now be virtually replicated, making it possible to train less expensively and more often. Networking advances, particularly broadband, have made it feasible to train from a distance and promise to improve training overall. A look at two examples shows just what these advances are and how they’re being applied.

Laptop combat

One of the examples comes from DRC, courtesy of a program originally developed as part of a project for the Army Research Institute of Fort Leavenworth, Kan. In today’s military, training involves sophisticated equipment like digital battle command systems and far-flung personnel. The combination makes it difficult to rotate a group through a training center or to bring the equipment to a given unit with enough frequency.

The solution proposed and demonstrated by DRC involves hardware and the accompanying software. Together with the right lesson plan, it is used to train personnel in the collective coordination needed for a successful combat mission. A typical setup might consist of eight commercial, off-the-shelf laptops running a standard Windows operating system. The computer group is connected through a single switch, with one of the laptops acting as a console server. The emulation that controls the training exercise is handled by a Java applet. The training can be accomplished at the unit level or via the Web at multiple locations.

The software can present practical exercises that drive message, radio and visual traffic. This can be done using already present hardware so that the simulation need not be expensive. The only added piece of gear is the laptop server for the instructor. “We’re able to put them in that training environment at a very, very low cost,” said Tremlett.

The system is still under evaluation by the US Army. DRC is now gearing up to offer something similar to meet homeland security training needs.

A better model airplane

Another example of what can be done when computers assist training comes from American Systems of Chantilly, Va. Earlier this year, the company demonstrated its virtual reality trainer on Capitol Hill. The F/A-18 Simulated Avionics Maintenance Trainer was developed to help train maintenance personnel for the US Navy’s F/A-18 jets. It’s essentially the concept of a flight simulator applied to the problem of training, and the Navy currently has eight or so of the training simulators.

The system has a two-screen student station with a two-dimensional virtual cockpit and a three-dimensional virtual aircraft maintenance display. Instructors can open or short any one of some 10,000 virtual wires found in the electrical circuits on the aircraft, forcing the student to troubleshoot a simulated problem of the instructor’s choosing. While doing so, the student can walk around the aircraft, in a virtual sense, and open up all the compartments on the actual airplane. The system responds using the same type of approach that makes video games realistic.

“This is a physics-based model. That means that the model running behind it can simulate all kinds of actions the student is going to take,” said Ali Kalwar, the Orlando, Fla.-based manager of the simulator program.

The company carefully designed the system to provide an immersive experience. The designers also took pains to fashion a user interface that was unobtrusive so that students would not be reminded that they were interacting with a computer.

According to Kalwar, the virtual approach has a number of advantages. For one thing, it’s cheaper than an actual aircraft and it also can be less expensive than a high fidelity hardware trainer. The virtual approach also offers an availability of 99.5 percent, far higher than the 90 percent or so availability for hardware.

In a complex piece of equipment like a fighter jet, Kalwar said that achieving accuracy required taking some 15,000 photographs, which had to be converted into such information as texture data so that the digital representation of the aircraft would be faithful to the real thing. The operation of the aircraft maintenance simulator is handled by three commercial, off-the-shelf computers.

In the case of simpler systems, the pictures required will be fewer and the computing power less. That could cut the cost considerably from that of the aircraft simulator, which runs about $200,000 without the cockpit and just under a million dollars with it. “For something simple, you could do it for a hardware cost of maybe $50,000 plus and then some software,” said Kalwar.

The company hasn’t yet applied the concept to homeland security-related training situations. However, it is seeking to develop new areas where the technology and its expertise can be applied.