The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Sensors Directorate nominated a tool from Charles River Analytics as a success story for its innovative use of technology to help maintain information dominance in contested areas. Argumentation-based Negotiation for Automated Sensor Tracking (ANAST) addresses the Air Force’s need to use sensor resources much more effectively in dynamic tactical situations, in comparison with today’s operations.

Sensor resources must be deployed and managed effectively throughout an engagement, especially when the number of potential targets exceeds the availability of surveillance assets. ANAST accomplishes this task by easing the coordination of numerous remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) assets tracking a number of ground vehicles in real-time, based on the video imagery generated by each RPA. It does this by integrating a video exploitation component to track and identify vehicles of interest captured by the imagery with a resource management component coordinating the assignment of RPAs to tracked vehicles, including handoffs when appropriate. ANAST technology can be applied to a variety of missions that need dynamic multi-sensor management.

ANAST also expands the feature set of VisionKit, Charles River’s library of computational vision components, to include functionality for geo-registration, vehicle color classification, Cursor-on-Target (CoT) input/output, and GPU acceleration. Charles River is also applying ANAST’s tracking algorithms to a number of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR)-related applications involving a variety of sensors.