Military intelligence Soldiers with the twenty fifth Infantry Division practice on the One World Terrain drone and mapping system on February 4, 2021 at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. (US Army photograph by Staff Sgt. Thomas Calvert by way of DVIDS)
WASHINGTON: The Army’s bold One World Terrain (OWT) high-fidelity 3D map of the globe for coaching is more and more being eyed by operators as a future instrument for positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) in GPS-denied environments, in accordance with senior Army officers.
The thought can be for Army autos to be uploaded with theater-relevant 3D maps generated by OWT previous to deployment, Army coaching consultants advised reporters on the margins of the annual Association of the United States Army (AUSA) convention final week. Those maps then could possibly be utilized in battle as alternate PNT sources when an adversary has managed to jam GPS satellite tv for pc indicators or when there merely isn’t sufficient bandwidth out there to attach.
“Think about the GPS-denied environment, when those vehicles need to get from point A to point B, if they have One World Terrain data set loaded, and they have cameras — which those vehicles will be outfitted with — then they can do land navigation, dead reckoning, along the way and they no longer need GPS,” defined Joe Parsons, of the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment Cross Functional Team (STE-CFT). “So, this is powerful.”
The authentic $35.8 million Phase 1 Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract for OWT was awarded in June 2019 to Vricon, which was acquired by Maxar Technologies in July 2020. A Phase II contract was awarded in February, value value $39.3 million. If all three phases and choices are exercised, the overall worth of the OWT prototype challenge is $94.7 million, in accordance with an organization press launch.
Maxar, a serious operator of Earth imaging satellites, offers 2D imagery, and software program that renders it into 3D fashions of the terrain, an organization official defined. Then the Army is compiling that imagery into a pc database in a kind that may be shared amongst platforms and soldier package.
Example rendering of Vricon OWT basis knowledge. (Maxar Technologies)
OWT is without doubt one of the foundational components of the Army’s STE-Information System modernization initiative led by the STE-CFT, below Army Futures Command. The challenge is managed by the Program Executive Office Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI). But Army officers have acknowledged that world terrain mapping has battlefield makes use of nearly from the get go, and has been pursuing numerous use instances.
The Army has already begun to combine OWT in its two parallel efforts to develop new Robotic Combat Vehicles (RCV): RCV (Medium) and RCV (Light), Parsons mentioned.
“They are using One World Terrain in their initial experimentation studies,” he mentioned, with the aim being for all future autos to be so geared up.
QinetiQ North America, and its associate Pratt Miller Defense delivered a quartet of seven-ton RCV (Light) autos to the Army this previous November and December. The Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC) on the Detroit Arsenal, Michigan, in May took supply of the final of 4 RCV (Medium) prototypes. RCV (Medium) is constructed by Textron Systems, with associate Howe&Howe, and relies on Textron’s 10-plus-ton Ripsaw mini-tank.
QinetiQ-Pratt Miller Robotic Combat Vehicle (Light)
Brig. Gen. William Glaser advised the AUSA viewers Oct. 12 that the Army is working with the opposite providers because it evaluates the potential operational makes use of of OWT — together with to be used within the Pentagon’s wider Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) of all-domain operations across the globe.
“We’ve actually talked to many of our joint partners,” Glaser mentioned in response to a query from Breaking Defense. “The fact is that they’ve seen the potential that One World Terrain has.”
For instance, he famous in the course of the press convention later, an OWT-generated map of Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, was utilized by the 82nd Airborne Division in the course of the evacuation of US residents.
Glaser mentioned that his crew is “actually very proud of that product, because it really just started off as an idea within the simulations community, but it’s expanded out significantly into the operational community.”
“When we can converge the training and operational community into one, that’s very clearly a win,” he mentioned.
