Adaptive Gaming and Training Environment for Maintenance Operations

ABSTRACT: The ultimate goal of this Phase II SBIR is to provide the Air Force with a game-based approach to train Air Force maintenance personnel. Sonalysts believes that the most cost-effective solution will include: The continued development of specifications for a SAM-T that uniquely uses game engine AI, scenario generation, IMI, IETMs, event management, performance tracking tools, and event/goal trigger mechanisms for adapting content based on performance and level of underlying knowledge about the system or subsystem. The development of a reconfigurable SAM-T prototype system containing learning adaptation based on game AI and real-time authoring. The prototype system will support reconfiguration to an alternate system/subsystem midway through the Phase II effort, as well as the capability for participating in a distributed mission training simulation environment. Completion of a Phase III production SAM-T simulation system. The SAM-T system will provide a complete training environment in which domain specific plug-ins can be developed to train a wide variety of maintenance training tasks. These plug-ins or maintenance packages will be designed using the SAM-T Software Development Kit (SDK) to make full use of the training environment, and leverage SAM-T common libraries to provide an immersive experience to deliver training to students. BENEFIT: The research areas to be examined in this Phase II SBIR project by Sonalysts will have a significant impact on the effectiveness of Air Force maintenance training, long-term sustainability, and TOC. Currently the Air Force has a maintenance training requirement to explore the training utility of developing gaming environments that incorporate adaptive approaches to tailoring learning where complex maintenance tasks can be trained in realistic scenarios and simulations. The results of this Phase II SBIR project will satisfy this requirement with a low-cost game-based solution that provides Air Force maintenance personnel a standard framework with user sustainability tools for developing maintenance trainers for any Air Force domain. The vision of SAM-T is to provide a robust, flexible architecture that can be applied to multiple domains. The provided tools and SDK will enable the architecture to be used to create training packages in any domain. Therefore, the architecture can be applied to any area that requires maintenance style training: aircraft maintenance and support, UAV maintenance, surface ship maintenance, and submarine maintenance. The trainer could facilitate the training for the Air Force and Navy needs and also be applicable to commercial training markets.