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Urban Reasoning and Geospatial Exploitation Technology (URGENT)
Program Manager: Dr. Todd Hughes
Mission:
The recognition of targets in urban environments poses unique operational challenges for the warfighter. Historically, target recognition has focused on conventional military objects, with particular emphasis on military vehicles such as tanks and armored personnel carriers. In many cases, these threats exhibit unique signatures and are relatively geographically isolated from densely populated areas. The same cannot be said of today’s asymmetric threats, which are embedded in urban areas, thereby forcing U.S. Forces to engage enemy combatants in cities with large civilian populations. Under these conditions, even the most common urban objects can have tactical significance: trash cans can contain improvised explosive devices, doors can conceal snipers, jersey barriers can block troop ingress, roof tops can become landing zones, and so on. Today’s urban missions involve analyzing a multitude of urban objects in the area of regard. As military operations in urban regions have grown, the need to identify urban objects has become an important requirement for the military. Understanding the locations, shapes, and classifications of objects is needed for a broad range of pressing urban mission planning analytical queries (e.g., finding all roof top landing zones on three story buildings clear of vertical obstructions and verifying ingress routes with maximum cover for ground troops). In addition, it will enable automated time-sensitive situation analysis (e.g., alerting for vehicles found on a road shoulder after dark and estimating damage to a building exterior after an explosion) that will make a significant positive impact on urban operations.
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