Lisa Heidelberg, chief of the mission command capabilities division at the U.S. Army‘s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center, has discussed her team’s initiatives to accelerate preparation of infrastructure for an operation.
The Army said Wednesday Heidelberg told reporters during a July 28 media event her group aims to develop expeditionary command post tents and eliminate the need for wires and keyboards in CPs.
“To get to an expeditionary force, you need to enable the commander to be mobile, to be able to command from outside the CP,” she added.
Tyler Barton, CERDEC project lead for expeditionary command post capabilities, said his team has created a CP tent that is designed to support assembly within seconds as well as house a Humvee to remove the need for trailers.
The 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment has tested the tent during the Network Integration Evaluation exercises held at Fort Bliss in October last year, according to Barton.
He added his team also worked to remove video cables in the 200-pound Jupiter Switch transit box through the Display Viewer Application that is designed to connect computers over a wireless local area network.
Cyndi Carpenter, CERDEC data engineering branch chief, said her team has developed the Single, Multimodal, Android Service for Human-Computer Interaction app as part of efforts to replace keyboards with gesture, voice interaction and eye tracking technologies.
SMASH is designed to translate voice commands to activate controls on a monitor display of a battlefield, the Army noted.
Carpenter added SMASH completed laboratory and user tests and is slated to undergo a field environment assessment.
