The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has made its ACTUV Tactics Simulator available for public download.
According to a DoD rep, the software has been written to simulate actual evasion techniques used by submarines – challenging each player to track them successfully.
“DARPA’s ACTUV program is developing a fundamentally new tool for the Navy’s ASW toolkit and seeks your help to explore how best to use this tool to track quiet submarines,” the rep explained.
“Before autonomous software is developed for ACTUV’s computers, DARPA needs to determine what approaches and methods are most effective. To gather information from a broad spectrum of users, ACTUV has been integrated into the Dangerous Waters game.”
As expected, the tracking vessel is not the only ship at sea, so players are required to safely navigate amongst commercial shipping traffic as they attempt to pinpoint the submarine.
As each simulation is completed, players are offered the option of submitting their tracking tactics to DARPA for analysis, which will then select the “best” tactics and build them into the ACTUV prototype.
ACTUV Tactics, a crowdsourced simulator, can be downloaded here.
