Iceni Labs is pleased to announce that Team Tercio’s DUELIST Situational Awareness for Small Units solution has been named as the winner of the National Security Innovation Network’s (NSIN’s) Situational Awareness in Dense Urban Environments 2020 Online Challenge. The win secures ongoing development funding for the Team Tercio solution.
Team Tercio is a UK-US industry team that integrates data visualisation, sensor and user interface technologies into a software platform that can build an integrated visual representation of the dismounted battlespace for small unit manoeuvre elements, enabling real-time situational awareness for warfighters in urban environments and supporting ground commander decision making. NSIN’s 2020 virtual hackathon challenged teams to develop novel sensing concepts that support ground teams operating in urban environments. Specifically, teams were asked to develop a system capable of collecting information about an interior space, transmitting the data to both emergency responders and C2 elements, interpreting the data, and presenting actionable information in an intuitive manner to the operator in a timeframe of minutes to hours. As the winning solution, Team Tercio’s DUELIST directly supports these operational requirements. The system fuses the output of a variety of sensors, including Iceni Labs’ SafeScan ‘sense through the wall’ radar technology, with inertial measurement unit motion detection and occupancy mapping technologies to build a 3D volumetric local map of the user's track and local environment. Presented as a Single Integrated Visual Representation of the dismounted battlespace and visualised on a connected smartphone or tablet, this map allows operators to instantly see their location within it, the physical makeup of their surroundings, position of friendlies and threats, and provides the ability to discern patterns to identify emerging threats. Multiple individual tracker units worn by operators, animals or drones, can also be integrated to produce a more comprehensive map of the area, also in real time.
SafeScan, developed under UK Defence and Security Accelerator Rapid Impact contract funding, is a handheld sensor that uses ultra-wideband radar to detect static and moving individuals through the wall, providing operators with easily understood visuals that allows them to quickly react to developing situations. “Our goal for DUELIST was to give small unit teams real-time answers to the questions, ‘what is the structure and layout of the area’, ‘where are the members of my team’, and ‘where are the neutrals and unfriendlies’, without relying on large, complex and remote platforms or adding to cognitive burden,” Alex Giles, Chief Commercial Officer, Iceni Labs, said. “And we wanted to do that by leveraging existing tactical platforms such as SafeScan in order to achieve successful, acceptable outcomes for operators. “Ultimately SafeScan supports better decision making in complex and challenging operating environments which directly lends itself to Team Tercio and DUELIST. It is extremely gratifying to see SafeScan’s capabilities being recognised by the NSIN and we look forward to taking this work forward and getting this technology into the hands of operators as quickly as possible.” SafeScan is undergoing trials and user feedback by UK small unit teams, with production set to begin in 2021. Trials with potential international users including the US, France and Australia are set to commence in early 2021.