The Advanced Guided Weapon Testbed (AGWT) at the Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate

Abstract

This paper describes the capabilities of the Kinetic Kill Vehicle Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator (KHILS) facility and the Virtual Munition Simulator (VMS) facility co-located at the AFRL Munitions Directorate, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Together they make up the Advanced Guided Weapon Testbed (AGWT) used to research advanced guidance components using hardware-in-the-loop simulation as well as the exploitation and investigation of new weapon concepts through the use of distributed simulation and wargaming. I. Introduction The Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate’s (AFRL/RW) mission is to develop, integrate, and transition science and technologies for air-launched munitions for the defeat of ground, air, space, and cyber targets. These technologies advance warfighter capabilities through the development of guided munitions that operate autonomously or semi-autonomously to acquire, track, engage, and kill moving and fixed targets. Many of these new weapon systems are becoming highly communicative and rely on multi-sensor data fusion, human-in-the-loop confirmation, and increased fire control for cooperative attack. AFRL/RW shares the DoD and AF vision that synthetic, or virtual, testing of these increasingly complex weapon systems will play a critical role in future success on the joint battlefield. To determine which guided weapon concepts and technologies are the most beneficial to the warfighter they need to have a good understanding of the kind of capabilities that advanced technology can bring to the joint and coalition battlefield. The AGWT allows for improved system effectiveness on the battlefield by getting advanced weapons’ concepts into the hands of the warfighter early in the weapons life cycle, providing an optimized solution, maximizing interoperability, and reducing risk and cost by utilizing a high fidelity simulation to augment flight tests. Made possible by the investment and direction of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) since 1987, and with the addition of Air Force funding in more recent years; the KHILS facility mission focuses on high fidelity hardware-inthe-loop (HWIL) simulation of guided hit to kill weapons. 1 KHILS serves as a testbed for development of hardware-in-the-loop test technologies for agencies around the country, such as scene projectors, projector control electronics, high frequency motion simulation, and synthetic scene generation, as well as performs Government owned non-destructive HWIL testing for guided munition hardware and software component research, development, and test (such as infrared (IR), Ladar, ultra-violet (UV), millimeter wave (MMW), and visible seekers; navigation systems; advanced guidance algorithms; flight hardware and software; and integrated guidance systems). Use of the KHILS for ground test reduces the number of flight tests needed for critical program decisions, provides risk reduction for those flight tests that do take place, and provides expanded operational envelope definition by investigating off-nominal scenario excursions. All of these roles help to lower overall flight test costs. The VMS facility provides a persistent distributed simulation connectivity to enable advanced guidance, sensor, and other advanced munition technologies and concepts to play in distributed joint experiments in the engineering, testing and training domains. It supports virtual and constructive simulation of advanced conceptual weapons, and components, with or without a man-in-the-loop. The VMS leverages state-of-the-art expertise from multiple disciplines including persistent distributed environments, constructive/virtual simulations, hardware-in-the-loop, munitions and targets modeling, guidance, navigation, and control, real time scene generation, and seekers, sensors, and signal processing. Without this early interaction, weapon systems brought to the field will suffer inadequacies in meeting the warfighter needs, and modification costs to meet these needs will be high. Having advanced weapon concepts used in joint war-gaming and training games/events gives the warfighter a chance to: explore and exploit