Charles River Analytics Inc. of Cambridge, MA announced on September 4 that it has received additional funding from the US Air Force to develop its Space Operation Visualizations Leveraging Augmented Reality (SOLAR) app. As part of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Hallmark program, SOLAR helps operators quickly develop situational awareness to maintain critical space assets.
Operators must accurately track assets in space—a
task becoming ever more difficult due to the vast number of unpredictable
players in space. Although operators need more advanced software tools to
anticipate and respond to actions, they often have to rely on outdated
processes—and incomplete information—to execute US military operations.
“Operators can make faster and more confident
decisions with SOLAR because it fuses proven human-computer interaction
technologies with next-gen augmented reality displays,” said Dr. Michael
Jenkins, senior scientist at Charles River Analytics and principal investigator
on the SOLAR effort. “SOLAR also offers intuitive visualizations and a
workflow-centric graphical user interface. With SOLAR, operators can quickly
make sense of outputs from novel AI, machine learning, and other advanced
analytic tools developed by both Charles River Analytics and third-party
companies.”
Charles River developed one of these analytic tools under our PICASSA effort (also part of the Hallmark program). The PICASSA analytic tool improves threat detection in space through probabilistic modeling and simulation. SOLAR allows space operators—who have minimal training in the reference models and reasoning behind PICASSA—to easily understand and incorporate these outputs into their space situational awareness and course-of-action development workflow to arrive at decisions faster, with greater confidence.
Source: Charles River
By Loren Blinde
September 6, 2019
