MOUT project
The U.S. Military increasingly finds itself operating in cities,
as witnessed in recent conflicts in Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. Military operations in urban terrain, commonly
designated by its acronym MOUT, has become one of the fastest growing
areas of concern for the military. MOUT concerns actions where
enemy forces use guerilla-like tactics under the cover provided by
fighting in a city.
For example, entering a building to clear it of hostiles is far different
from open warfare in a field:
This project focused on MOUT within a single building.
We are "zoomed in" to research small team movements and coordination
in the critical operation of clearing a building. This involves
searching the building room by room, eliminating enemy combatants,
identifying non-combatants, and searching for things such as cached
weapons, documents, and bomb-making materials.
We constructed a facility for research into building clearing
training at the
263rd Army National Guard, Air and Missile Defense Command site
in Anderson, SC, approximately 15 km from Clemson University.
The facility (appx. 200 sq. m.) consists of two parts, a "shoothouse"
and an instructor operator station.
The shoothouse, where building clearing exercises are
conducted, consists of six rooms and interconnecting hallways.
The rooms are reconfigurable to provide a variety of sizes, shapes,
and entry points. The following pictures show the shoothouse from 4
different viewpoints, along with a CAD representation.
The shoothouse is equipped with 36 cameras
positioned for tracking trainees during exercises. The instructor
operation station contains computers and other equipment used for
collecting, processing, recording, and presenting tracking information
on the training exercises. A large screen allows for presentation of
the recorded exercise, for example for an after action review.
We constructed a custom lasertag system that enables us to track
weapon orientations, head orientations, and firing, and wirelessly
transmit these data. The point of our system is to be able to track
where the subjects are aiming their weapons, and where they are looking,
at all times, not just when they fire their weapons.
Both the rifle and the helmet are equipped with a combination
magnetometer/accelerometer, produced by Honeywell Corp., to track
orientation.
The weapons emit laser pulses upon firing that can be detected
by sensors on the weapons and helmets of other subjects.
All data are broadcast at 8-15 Hz and are available
for real-time or off-line analysis for deriving training metrics.
The following figures show a weapon and some of the parts.
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| Rifle | Helmet | Custom circuit board
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| Circuit board inside rifle stock | Inside helmet
| Orientation sensor inside rifle barrel
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Working with
UFI Serving Science, Inc., we constructed a custom heart
monitoring device. The device can be worn on a belt loop or using a
small shoulder strap. It measures heartrate and heartrate variability
indices. All our devices, including the rifle, helmet, and heart monitor,
use the 802.11b standard to transmit data wirelessly to the instructor
operator station. This allows us to use commercial routers and standard
socket programming techniques to communicate to our devices, lowering
cost and improving reliability.
Data
Our primary objective was to collect and provide data on training
exercises for use by the larger research community. We recorded
hundreds of training exercises that can be analyzed.
Please contact us to inquire about obtaining a copy of the data.
An example recording may be downloaded
here. Note that there are several files, including a
program that replays the recorded data files.
The following image shows a screenshot from the replay.
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Office of Naval Research
VIRTE program,
and the U.S. Army
Urban Operations Focus Area Collaborative Team (UO FACT) program.
Some seed funding was provided by the Clemson University
Office of the Provost and the
College of Engineering and Science.
The
South Carolina Military Department
provided space for the project at the
263rd AAMDC site.
Military
The first image shows part of our team visiting Quantico, Virginia,
where the U.S. Marines train.
The second image shows us visiting Ft. Benning, Georgia, where the
U.S. Army trains.
A group of marines, who had recently returned from Fallujah, Iraq,
conducts exercises at our site.
Some
images of marines training at 29 Palms, California.
MOUT Project Page / Clemson / ahoover@clemson.edu
