Advanced Personal Digital Assistant for Training and Simulation

Tomorrow's Objective Force warrior will be involved in highly fluid and dynamic engagements that require the coordination of multiple team players. The Pocket Team MultiMedia Warfighter (PTMW) is an innovative hand-held PDA application that supports liveteam collaboration in the battlefield. Each soldier can see the battle map as the mission evolves. The background of the map shows the terrain, while animated sprites display the location and motion of friendly and enemy forces. Additional overlay sheetscontain sprites with information about visibility, threat, mobility, and other situational awareness markers. A unique patent-pending architecture allows each PTMW station to feel like a full powered workstation. There is an intelligent partitioning of thework between the PTMW and the server engines. PTMW stations are responsible for the movement of graphic sprites, while the back-end servers do expensive simulation and map computations on an extensible server farm. Soldiers can easily interact with eachother in real-time to provide intelligence and planning data to synchronize military actions. Cutting edge compression and a unique data communication layer allow the PTMW to work in low bandwidth environments and deal robustly with communicationbreakdowns. The Pocket Team MultiMedia Warfighter (PTMW) is a tool that is aimed at making a radical improvement in the training of war fighters by teaching them how to coordinate and orchestrate actions in live battlefield conditions. It can also be usedin joint ground/air actions with Marine, Special Forces, Air and Navy troops. Because PTMW is a very flexible system it can be readily adapted to assist in other map-based coordination tasks. These applications include: civil defense, forest firemanagement, emergency response to terrorist attacks, and civil disaster coordination between police, fire, and emergency response teams. Commercial uses include multiplayer gaming, remote medical collaboration, and teaching teamwork skills in schools byPTMW supported outdoor collaborative games.