Automated Target Hand-Off for Sensor to Shooter (ATHOSS)

Unmanned Systems (UMS) will pervade the future force battlespace and work closely with humans in joint targeting. The US Army ARDEC has developed the concept of a joint manned-unmanned system team (JMUST), where target handoff between humans and UMS working together in a small team has been demonstrated. Human to human, human to UMS, UMS to human, and UMS to UMS target handoff operations are all required for JUMUST. This is a ground-breaking program in terms of implementation of advanced concepts for human-UMS teaming, but target handoff remains a manual operation. For JMUST to be successful, it must demonstrate fully automated, high speed target handoff between humans and UMS, and vice versa. In Phase I, CHI Systems prototyped and demonstrated an ATHOSS prototype that performs fast automated target selection, weapon-target pairing, target handoff and sensor to shooter communications link selection. In Phase II, we will fully implement the prototype in order to perform target identification, call for effects, weapon target pairing, shooter assignment, and establishment of the sensor to shooter communications link in less than 5 seconds. The current prototype performs this action in 20 seconds. This component will be portable for use in multiple future force targeting architectures.