Autonomous Virtual Assistant (AVA)

AEGIS watchstanders monitor tracks in the battlespace around the ship, tracking, identifying, and engaging threats to ensure the safety of the ship. This track management task can be overwhelming today, and will become more difficult with new adversary approaches such as unmanned air systems and swarming surface tactics including saturation raids. While AEGIS provides some capabilities for automatically identifying potential threats, making recommendations, and even engaging threats, its decisions are based on fairly rigid rules that do not take into account the current context in which the ship is operating. Instead, watchstanders must build up and provide their own context about the battlespace, the geo-political environment, and the normal background activities that occur in the environment. By not taking this information into account, current AEGIS tools leave the operators with too many tracks to manage on their own. SoarTech and team propose to design, develop and assess a ship-board Virtual Assistant to significantly reduce the workload of AEGIS operators. This Virtual Assistant will help watchstanders make decisions by learning relevant information from the environment and the watchstanders, providing additional context for decision-making, and making recommendations about tracks and potential responses.