OSU professors release ammunitions encyclopedia to aid soldiers fighting overseas
Monday, April 18, 2011
Whether they are family, friends or just acquaintances, we all know people who are currently fighting overseas, and we want them all to be as safe as possible while serving our country. With a new innovation designed by researchers at Oklahoma State University, more of these brave men and women may have a chance to return home safely.
Professors and students working at the Institute for Research in Information Systems in the Spears School of Business at OSU have partnered with the Defense Ammunition Center to create an encyclopedia that soldiers can use to better identify, handle and maintain military munitions. This tool, called the Ammunitions Multimedia Encyclopedia, uses virtual reality technology to create a realistic, hands-on training environment and can be used on anything from a desktop computer to an iPhone®.
"Handling and transporting live ammunition can be very dangerous," said Ramesh Sharda, a management science and information systems professor at OSU and the director of IRIS. "The goal of AME is to provide a comprehensive tool to support personnel handling munitions. It provides an encyclopedia of currently used munitions which can be used for identification and refresher training."
Sharda said DAC provides excellent training for Quality Assurance Specialist Ammunition Surveillance personnel. As part of the QASAS training program, interns are required to complete a two-year training schedule, including one year of on-site training at DAC’s McAlester, Okla., location and another year on an assigned installation. The researchers and DAC officials said the goal for the ammunition encyclopedia is to aide in this initial training, strengthen the QASAS personnel’s familiarization with ammunition and its components, and help increase ammunition knowledge and safety in the field.
“We at IRIS thought this would be a very interesting challenge,” said Joyce Lucca, a research professional in the MSIS department at OSU who is working on the project. “I think working on AME has enabled us to take our research to a practical level quickly.”
Lucca said AME is an on-going project and has come a long way since the professors and students at IRIS began working on it. It currently includes 180 different munitions, and the researchers have been asked by DAC to add another 100 items for the fiscal year 2010-2011. AME now provides 2-D and 3-D images where a user can zoom in on a specific feature or rotate an image 360 degrees to view it from different angles. The program even has videos to help a user understand how to properly inspect each item and pages with detailed information about each item and its parts.
Sharda said one of the best and most rewarding aspects of working on the AME project was being able to use OSU students to help develop the software.
“Working with the students to develop new technology that can benefit war fighters has been rewarding for everyone on the project,” Sharda said. “In addition, it provides the students with a tremendous learning experience, making them attractive to their prospective employers. AME has been a great way to translate our expertise in education to a domain that makes an even bigger difference in our lives and the lives of fellow citizens who are tasked with the responsibility to handle ammunition.”
For more information about AME, contact IRIS at 405-744-8850 or http://irisweb.iris.okstate.edu/contact.php.