AFTR - Animation Framework for Teaming Research

In the DoD, there is a pressing need to conduct research to identify the most effective Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) approaches within the near-future Joint All-Domain Command and Control Environment. This calls for a flexible simulation environment that can rapidly respond to address evolving concepts and technologies. High fidelity simulation environments have their place in the DoD research world, but they come with high costs in terms of time, effort, complexity and skill sets required to configure them for a particular use case. On the other hand, low fidelity environments are relatively easy to configure and use because of their inherent simplicity,  but they are often not sufficient for investigating the situational or cognitive complexities encountered in real-world environments in a cognitively authentic manner. In this Phase II effort, 361 Interactive will fully develop and validate a mid-fidelity testbed solution that researchers can use to create, prototype, and conduct experiments to investigate a wide range of human-autonomy teaming issues in JADC2 task environments. Our goal is to provide the minimum level of simulation fidelity that will still present cognitively authentic problem sets to the participants. By drawing inspiration from visual animation tools, we will provide researchers with a rapid and intuitive capability to configure scenarios, teams, machine agents, experimental user interfaces, and metrics for experiments. In this effort we will fully define requirements, conduct detailed design activities, and perform a stepped series of validation tests to assess experimental configurability, functionality, and scalability.