Entity Automation for VBS Game Environment

Reduced Exercise Overhead & Increased Throughput

During Army training exercises, highly-skilled staff frequently performed low-level tasks. These tasks included listening to virtual radios for trainee battle commands and manually triggering VBS™ tactical game scripts to activate entity behaviors. Training a single soldier in a standard platoon maneuver with four tanks required fifteen soldiers to role-play tank drivers, gunners, and other minor roles. The Army needed a cost-effective, drop-in simulation that could increase trainee throughput while reducing instructor and role-player workload.

ASTi’s Construct automated overhead tasks, producing a trainee throughput increase of 15 to 1. Before, exercises required 15 soldiers to support one command trainee; with Construct, all 16 soldiers can train simultaneously. To achieve Live Virtual Constructive (LVC) training capabilities, Construct automated Virtual Battlespace (VBS)-generated tanks using animated entities that can recognize and understand human speech. As a result, trainees and animated entities can correspond over virtual radios, and tank entities exhibit realistic behaviors, such as moving into formations, traversing to waypoints, and shooting at targets.

Increased Reliability & Guaranteed Interoperability

The Army’s legacy, in-game VBS virtual radios were unreliable, causing exercise downtime and decreasing throughput. Additionally, the virtual radios were not interoperable with the customer’s Live Virtual Constructive-Integrating Architecture (LVC-IA). This architecture links Games For Training to virtual simulators, like the Aviation Combined Arms Tactical Trainer (AVCATT) and Close Combat Tactical Trainer (CCTT).

ASTi replaced the virtual radios with Voisus, a radio communication environment providing guaranteed interoperability across the LVC-IA program. Voisus encompasses games, virtual simulators, and constructive simulations, such as OneSAF. Additionally, Voisus is field-proven across all of the DoD’s training programs, including the following:

• Air Force DMO
• Navy NASMP and NCTE
• Marine Corps ADVTE
• Joint Staff JNTC

Increased Simulation Fidelity

The legacy VBS radios could not operate in all of the LVC-IA virtual simulators’ advanced communication modes. To communicate with VBS game players, aircrews using AVCATT helicopter simulators set up and operated onboard radios in an unrealistic, dumbed-down manner.

Voisus’s radio environment shares the same technology of past radios that ASTi successfully integrated into the Army’s multi-million dollar helicopter simulators. Additionally, Voisus offers trainees advanced crypto and frequency hopping radio modes and physics-based interference and ranging effects.