UK-based spatial computing company Hadean has been awarded competitive funding by the UK Ministry of Defence’s (MoD’s) Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) initiative to develop and scale a complex and representative synthetic human terrain for British Army simulations, the company announced on 1 February 2024.
The project, which will see Hadean contracted to the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), aims to enhance military training in land environments by populating scenarios with meaningful ‘pattern of life’ behaviours and services, such as local leaders, military and government agencies, non-government organisations (NGOs), media and industry. This capability, implemented as part of the Hadean artificial intelligence (AI)-powered spatial computing platform and represented as a real-time social media hub within the live, virtual and constructive (LVC) environments, will seamlessly integrate AI models to deliver a configurable and consistent representation of audiences, actors, adversaries and enemies (A3E) behaviours.
The work is set to be completed this year.
Supported by a large language model (LLM) at its core, the Hadean system will use AI to understand the evolving context during an LVC training exercise, causing the simulated A3Es to respond dynamically to the details of the actions of the trainees. These, in turn, will cause reactions and prompt training personnel to adjust their approach and tactics, effectively bridging the physical and virtual worlds through real-time interactions.
“Exploiting novel technologies, like generative AI, at the speed of relevance and transforming them into new capabilities for the end user is at the centre of what agile SMEs have to deliver,” Craig Beddis, Hadean’s CEO, was quoted as saying in a company press release. “This is a great milestone for Hadean as we continue to innovate at the disruptive edge of defence technology, forging our spatial compute technology into a decision support tool that offers credible and quality advice and helps generate decision advantage for the military and government leaders.”
Secure by design and interoperable, Hadean’s social media tool will be able to integrate with both current and novel training systems to enhance their potential for impactful training. In combination with AI-powered data exploitation capabilities, it will also generate an after Action-review dashboard to help commanders identify weak points and improve their future performance.
The competitive funding secured by Hadean has been provided by the British Army in support of its future Army Collective Training System (ACTS) programme. Hadean’s work builds on the recent delivery of a pathfinder contract that helped validate a spatial compute platform approach for the British Army by developing a cloud-native simulation and deploying it in an austere environment in Kenya to support LVC training operations and after-action reviews.
