Research & Development
SAMSUNG TELECOMMUNICATIONS AMERICA (STA, www.samsungwireless.com) and the United States Army’s Communications Electronics Research & Development Engineering Center (CERDEC) are evaluating a version of mobile WiMAX known as WiBRO (the South Korean configuration of the broadband mobile wireless-com-munications format) as well as by the IEEE 802.16e standard.
Samsung ( www.samsung.com), perhaps best known for its mobile wireless portable devices, will work with CERDEC at the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) On-The-Move (OTM) experimentation facility located at Fort Dix, NJ. The analysis will focus on leveraging commercially available WiBRO technologies in a mobile military environment in lieu of the customary commercially fixed infrastructure. WiBRO is a broadband wireless format designed to allow users to move between base stations while placement of these base stations remains at strategic locations. Commercial markets for WiBRO and WiMAX include wireless communications of high-data-rate information, video, and multimedia services. As part of the Samsung/CERDEC analysis, engineers will characterize the performance of the WiBRO products in an environment consisting of
both mobile users and mobile base stations. Technologies, such as WiBRO, are attractive to the Army in order to provide an affordable wireless technology to the warfighter in a relatively short period of time.
LOCKHEED MARTIN’S Advanced Technology Laboratories ( www.lockheedmartin.com) has been granted a $1.7-million, 20-month contract by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to create an interface that will increase situational awareness for the challenging environment found in anti-ter-rorist operations. The new interface is to be called the Interface to the Warfighter, and is meant to be the human-to-sensor interface for the Large Tactical Sensor Networks (LTSN) program. The LTSN will enable networks of unmanned vehicles and unattended ground sensors to support the forces by performing automated collection, translation, fusion, and dissemination of sensor data into actionable intelligence. The Interface to the Warfighter will help create increased situational awareness by providing the sensor-gathered intelligence to small tactical units.
The new interface is a critical bridge between warfighters and the LTSN system. The Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Laboratories will design, develop, and demonstrate an interface
component that integrates its previous developments in natural language understanding, human alerting, mobile intelligent agents, automated information management, and ruggedized mobile computing.
According to Dr. Susan Harkness Regli, ATL principal investigator for the Advanced Technology Laboratories, “We will use our mission-focused approach to developing advanced, user-interface technologies to ensure that the Interface to the Warfighter is intuitive and safe to use, provides appropriate and seamless modes of interaction and automation for different operational and user constraints, and enhances warfighter effectiveness and mission success.”
The Advanced Technology Laboratories will demonstrate a prototype later this year. The prototype will enable personnel in a tactical unit to easily request intelligence from the field, quickly and naturally report relevant observations while deployed, and receive late-breaking intelligence in formats that are easy to understand and appropriate for the environment. Following a successful demonstration, a possible ONR option could extend the work to 32 months at a total contract value of $2.8 million.
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