News From USJFCOM: Command gains insights from research agreement with Raytheon


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Command gains insights from research agreement with Raytheon

U.S. Joint Forces Command's (USJFCOM) two-year cooperative research and
development agreement (CRADA) with Raytheon studied non-lethal weapons and
crowd behavior.

By Susy Dodson
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(NORFOLK, Va. - Feb. 10, 2009) -- U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and its industry partner Raytheon now have a greater understanding of the capabilities of current crowd modeling technologies according to command officials.

The understanding comes as a result of work completed over the two years under a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), a flexible non-Federal Acquisition Regulation-based partnership agreement between USJFCOM and Raytheon.

CRADAs offer an opportunity for both parties to share knowledge, personnel and facilities, and risks when conducting mutually beneficial research and development (R&D).

USJFCOM's Dan Judy, who oversees the command's Office of Research and Technology Applications (ORTA), explained how the CRADA benefitted the organizations.

"This partnership agreement provided for a flexible and continuous engagement where our irregular warfare urban operations warfighting and analytical expertise was coupled with the scientific and engineering capabilities of our Raytheon partners," Judy said. "The result was the establishment of a substantive, persistent environment where USJFCOM guided and evaluated research efforts."

According to Judy, the effort was a great demonstration in the use oftechnology transfer authority to enhance joint warfighting capability quickly.

Mark Vinyard, USJFCOM's principal investigator for the CRADA with Raytheon, said the command's team met with representatives from Raytheon to focus on crowd simulation and the effects of using non-lethal directed energy systems on crowds. These systems emit focused energy to help control and disperse crowds.

USJFCOM and Raytheon began analyzing non-lethal effects on crowd behavior once the best simulation systems were identified, according to Vinyard.

"We set up weekly telephone conferences attended by direct participants and the community of interest at large," said Vinyard. "Topics ranged from the underlying principles of modeling a crowd in a dynamic environment to technological hurdles in accurately modeling a directed energy system."

Tina Gaumond, Raytheon's modeling, simulation and analysis lead for the Net-Centric Integration and Experimentation Center Tidewater, described
different aspects of the modeling and simulation (M&S).

"We modeled non-lethal weapons, kinetic energy weapons and directed energy weapons," Gaumond said. "With the analysis side of it we captured all the data that was put on the network and we used the DIAG [data instrumentation analysis graphic use interface] to capture different graphs of different social behaviors of the crowd, whether they were fearful, running away, hiding and so forth."

According to Vinyard, crowd responses in the simulation were created based on existing crowd behavior data to model a large crowd, as well as model friendly forces, their weapons, vehicles, and the terrain, to enable that testing and experimentation.

In addition to modeling crowd behaviors, modeling the effect of directed energy systems was an integral component to enable testing and experimentation of how crowds respond when they are targets of a non-lethal weapon.

"The current constructive simulations do a remarkable job at modeling kinetic objects, such as physical objects traveling from point A to point B, but the impact of a directed energy system, which emits a "beam" vice a singular kinetic object, is more difficult to accurately model," Vinyard said.

Steve Hansen, the experimentation lead for Raytheon, explained the outcome of their collaboration with USJFCOM.

"We broke ground both with directed energy weapons, which haven't been modeled very extensively, certainly modeling human behavior now is a big challenge. When you think of M&S, it's primarily physics-based," Hansen said. "You know how airplanes fly and tanks drive, but modeling human behavior is a new area with a lot of questions and so we knew that this was going to be a challenge and we didn't solve it all, but we've really got some good insights."

Earlier this month, Raytheon received the Modeling and Simulation Analysis Team Award for outstanding achievement in modeling & simulation in non-lethal effects and crowd behavior at the 2009 Modeling and Simulation Summit here.