During complex incident response over a wide area, command centers can lose visibility of blue force positions, degrading Common Operating Picture (COP) for tactical coordination.
(Concept of Operations / CONOPS):
- Passive Signature: Each blue team member wears an assigned, lightweight visible-spectrum passive identifier.
- Overhead Unmanned Aerial Systems: UAS flies the theater, tactical edge video processing enables real-time processing during the response.
- Geolocation: System georeferences latitude/longitude from drone image data during the response for COP integration.
- C4 Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance: Detected Blue team member locations are displayed on an edge device map and/or transmitted to a Tactical Awareness Kit (*TAK) system or feed other ISR systems.
Benefits:
- Low RF Signature: Passive optical tracking means supports Emissions Control, with no on-body RF emissions (no “squawks”). This ensures Low Probability of Intercept / Low Probability of Detection (LPI/LPD), preventing adversarial triangulation, SIGINT tracking, or electronic warfare interference in RF constrained environments.
- Size, Weight, Power and Cost optimized: SWaP-C – minimal additional batteries and charging cycles.
- Rapid Interoperability for Ad-Hoc Teams: Generate and deploy optical identifiers on-the-fly. Suitable for multi-jurisdictional response, allowing immediate integration of disjointed agencies into a unified Blue Force Tracking network.