SOAR TECHNOLOGY, LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N142-090

Description

As technology continues to drive changes in Naval operations, warfighters increasingly must exercise strategies in complex team-based environments. A key to successful completion of mission operations in teams is communication. In domains where performers have highly specialized skills, the curation of shared mental models amongst crew is critical. However, current individual training capabilities in the Navy offer trainees no opportunity to exercise communication skills in a cost-effective manner. As such, the Navy is currently interested in augmenting existing task training technology with synthetic role-players. An initial showcase for this ability is to support Tactical Coordinator training in the anti-submarine warfare (ASW), anti-surface warfare (ASUW), and intelligence surveillance reconnaissance (ISR) domains. In this proposal, we will detail how we will develop Soar agents, supported by robust speech recognition and dialogue management, to develop intelligent, interactive synthetic role players for simulated P-8 training. Because of our significant past performance in related areas and our existing technology components, SoarTech will support both a functional system design and proof-of-concept demonstration for select P-8A role players, interacting with the TACCO in a representative training vignette, by the end of Phase I.