A Persistent Simulation Environment for Autonomous Systems

The age of Autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Systems (AUAS) is creating new challenges for the accreditation and certification requiring new standards, policies and procedures that sanction whether a UAS is safe to fly. Establishing a basis for certification of autonomous systems via research into trust and trustworthiness is the focus of Autonomy Teaming and TRAjectories for Complex Trusted Operational Reliability (ATTRACTOR), a new NASA Convergent Aeronautics Solution (CAS) project. Simulation Environments to test and evaluate AUAS decision making may be a low-cost solution to help certify that various AUAS systems are trustworthy enough to be allowed to fly in current general and commercial aviation airspace. NASA is working to build a peer-to-peer persistent simulation (P3 Sim) environment. The P3 Sim will be a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environment were AUAS avatars can interact with a complex dynamic environment and each other. The focus of the effort is to provide AUAS researchers a low-cost intuitive testing environment that will aid training for and assessment of decisions made by autonomous systems such as AUAS. This presentation focuses on the design approach and challenges faced in development of the P3 Sim Environment is support of investigating trustworthiness of autonomous systems

How the globalization of video games is changing the way militaries operate

Today more than ever video games are reaching a global audience. In the past the military facilitated the growth of video games, but that dynamic may be changing. Military use of video games to build and operate their army’s is increasing. The first part of this report will look at how video games have grown into a $100 billion industry and where the industry is heading. The second part of this report will focus in on how the military has utilized video game technology as a recruiting and training tool. Then move into how different components of technology in video games is being used in modern warfare. In the end this report will show how the globalization of video games is changing the way the military operates.Kinesiology and Health Educatio

The Effects of Commercial Video Game Playing: A Comparison of Skills and Abilities for the Predator UAV

Currently, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are operated by pilots and navigators experienced with manned combat aircraft. With a projected increase in UAVs, more combat pilots will be needed to operate these aircraft. Yet, if the current operational tempo continues, the supply of combat pilots may not be able to meet the demand. Perhaps alternative pools of Air Force personnel could be considered for UAV duty to meet operational requirements. Because the Predator UAV is a software-driven aircraft, video game players (VGPs) already possess and use many skills that may be similar to those of Predator UAV pilots. A variety of games can add situational awareness skills that a player/airman can bring to a new situation. This research examines the applicability of video-games-based skills to the operation of the Predator UAV. Nine people were interviewed to determine the overlap between piloting skills, UAV-specific skills, and skills gained and developed from gaming. The results indicate that frequent VGPs have the confidence and the consistent ability to obtain and retain new skills, many of which are related to operating the Predator UAV in a 2-D environment while not relying on the visual and nonvisual cues of the manned aircraft pilot

Performance Analysis of WebRTC-based Video Streaming over Power Constrained Platforms

This work analyses the use of the WebRTC framework on resource-constrained platforms. WebRTC is a consolidated solution for real-time video streaming, and it is an appealing solution in a wide range of application scenarios. We focus our attention on those in which power consumption, size and weight are of paramount importance because of size, weight and power requirements, such as the use case of unmanned aerial vehicles delivering real-time video streams overWebRTC to peers on the ground. The testbed described in this work shows that the power consumption can be reduced by changing WebRTC default settings while maintaining comparable video quality

War, Masculinity and Gaming in the Military Entertainment Complex: A Case Study of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Over the last decade, critical scholars have pointed to the acceleration of the cultural, aesthetic, technological and political economic ties between the military and entertainment industries, noting both its synergistic nature and the purported effects of militarism on an already masculinized, technophilic culture of gaming. This may have deleterious effects on society, where videogame players may be trained to think like soldiers—both in terms of combat performance and hegemonic military masculinity. Utilizing game studies methods of textual analysis and cyberethnography, and drawing on critical work concerning war and masculinity, this dissertation argues that while it is true that games such as these are imbued with problematic ideological content, the "training" that players receive is not primarily on these terms. Rather, players are disciplined to adhere to gamic norms of performance—efficiency, proficiency, and masculine performativity—which are inculcated by ludic structures and largely understood on terms which originate within the social ecology of gaming, transcending local social realities. This dissertation concludes that the performance required of players challenges traditional notions of the requirements of military masculinity, and that a critical challenge of the military entertainment complex is not that society becomes more militaristic, but rather that warfare, and performances within it, become more game-like

This Year in the MOVES Institute

in the Proceedings of IEEE Cyberworlds 2003, the International Conference on Cyberworlds, Singapore, 3 – 5 December 2003, pp. xxxiii-xl.An Invited Paper