ST Engineering Antycip Showcases Collaborative Tech with Partners at AWE

ST Engineering Antycip has joined forces with MAK and data analytics firm Cervus to demonstrate the power of its COTS software at the 2021 Army Warfighting Experiment.

The event is the most recent edition of the British Army’s flagship innovation experimentation programme, in partnership with Cervus, a veteran-owned data analytics company. It seeks to build relationships with industry partners to help the army prepare for the technologically advanced warfare of the future.

While 2021 marked the first time ST Engineering Antycip participated in the AWE programme, Cervus has taken part in the annual event since its inception in 2017 (and previously in its predecessor event, the Urban Experiment, or URBEX, series).

Cervus’ head of sales and marketing, Mark Whitehouse, explains the AWE partners’ respective roles: “Antycip brings the simulation engines and the expertise in running large-scale simulated activities; Cervus uses our experience to create the scenarios and metrics to measure performance at the beginning of the activity, then takes all the data created as the activities are run. Later, we exploit that data through our AI-powered analytics engine, Hive 2.0, to provide insights and secure an advantage for the front-line user.”

Specifically, the solution shown at AWE combined Hive 2.0 with MAK ONE, MAK Technologies' whole-world synthetic training environment, to show the MoD how the objectives of the British Army’s Collective Training Transformation Programme (CTTP) could be delivered now with commercial off-the-shelf systems (COTS) already on the market. “We were showing how ‘SME to the Three’” – small and medium-sized enterprises, which are subject matter experts, working in a single measurement environment – “could work to generate far bigger effects than the companies that were creating them,” adds Whitehouse.

For ST Engineering Antycip, the Army Warfighting Experiment gave the simulation specialist unprecedented access to end users in a non-programme environment, as well as providing it with a unique audience from which to gather information on the “usability and robustness of products in a real ‘operational’ environment,” explains its UK area manager, Chris Waldron.

ST Engineering’s role at AWE included setting up a distributed training simulation in MAK ONE with live tanks, weapons and soldiers, and connecting into synthetic soldiers and weapons, as well as supporting and engaging on a constructive MAK VR-Forces simulation.