Handheld, Low Cost Situational Awareness Using Existing Military Fielded Equipment

The growth of handheld GPS equipment has underscored the increasing utility of said devices for purposes beyond traditional time, position, and navigation. Concurrently, most domestic and international defense forces are actively searching for robust/low-cost solutions to enable the “every soldier a sensor” vision of individualized situational awareness (SitAw). Several current programs attempting to provide team or squad/platoon-level SitAw today are commonly too high in cost for individual soldier consideration, and are either unique in design (requiring lengthy vetting by military test authorities) or proprietary/commercial off the shelf approaches often inappropriate for the military warfighter environment. Exploitation of existing equipment, not only to rapidly solve this SitAw need but also to provide additional functions of high value (individual friend or foe/IFF and search and rescue/SAR) in an extremely cost effective and user-friendly manner, is considered a current “holy grail”. Lastly, interoperability with existing secure data and voice infrastructures (both for the intra-inter squad / team / platoon leader level of command, and control and the ability to interconnect further into local or further distributed C4I structures such as FBCB2) is highly desired, but with most approaches either dependent on development of one-sizefits-all radios or lengthy delays until large-scale programs are able to meet cost/size /availability targets. This paper presents the concept and design of the Rockwell Collins Situation Data Advisor system which integrates the existing, fielded, military GPS handheld DAGR with various existing tactical radios to create a handheld/pocketed, low weight, low cost, secure SitAw / IFF / SAR system via primarily a software upgrade. The system leverages the many functions available in the fielded DAGR to enable a map-based SitAw capability when configured with one of many fielded military tactical radios. This “radio-tailorable” approach renders secure voice and data exchange compatible with current Tactical Internet (TI) C4I systems using Joint Technical Architecture (JTA) compliant data formats, and allows “last mile” connectivity to soldiers below platoon level of voice and position/status data. Additional configurations (attached applique or cabled solutions) for the system and integration into local SitAw C4I software such as FalconView and FBCB2 are additionally discussed as are current and future applications.