Agnostic Controller Enhancement (ACE)

Naval Special Warfare (NSW) and MARSOC, particularly dismounted Operators, currently rely on physical toggles and controllers or touchscreens to interact, control, or otherwise benefit from a SUAS or UGV capabilities on mission. These current control solutions are both subject to failure and create potential to degrade Operator survivability and lethality depending on their context of use. For example, touchscreens cannot be operated when wearing gloves or in damp or wet environments and require head-down use. Controllers or toggles require Operators to disengage from their weapon and are difficult to use when prone. To address these shortcomings, Pison is proposing to extend, refine, test, and evaluate our TRL 4 Agnostic Controller Enhancement (ACE) system. ACE leverages Pison’s wristwatch-sized gesture control wearable, GAMBIT, that detects finger movements in combination with hand and arm movements to enable gesture control of electronic systems. ACE applies GAMBIT to the control of SUAS and UGVs by allowing Operators to create custom gestures that can be mapped to both direct control and indirect control (through gesture-based direction of onboard autonomy and autonomous capabilities) of these platforms and payloads. Evaluating the benefit of ACE for its intended use case will be achieved through a combination of synthetic and live testing.