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

Unmanned Systems (UMS) will pervade the future force battlespace and work closely with humans in the joint targeting environment. The US Army ARDEC has developed the concept of a joint manned-unmanned system team (JMUST), for which target handoff between humans and UMS working together in a small team is of critical importance. Human to human, human to armed UMS, UMS to human, and UMS to UMS target handoff operations are all required in this concept. This is a ground-breaking program in terms of implementation of advanced concepts for human-UMS teaming in combat operations, but target handoff remains a manual operation. In order for JMUST to be successful, it must demonstrate fully automated, high speed target handoff between humans and UMS, and vice versa. CHI Systems will design, prototype, and demonstrate an ATHOSS prototype that can perform extremely fast automated target selection, weapon-target pairing, target handoff and sensor to shooter communications link selection. The goal is to perform target identification, target submission to a fires and effects network, weapon target pairing, shooter assignment, and establishment of the sensor to shooter communications link in less than 10 seconds. This component will be portable for use in multiple future force targeting software architectures.