Squad VTB

ROLE: Design Director / Product Design
TEAM: 1x Product Designer, 1x Technical Designer, 3x Game Engineers, 1x Project Manager
PROJECT LENGTH: 2 years

Squad VTB (or Squad Virtual TestBed) provided a digital simulation of a Marine fireteam on patrol in a desert village, modeled after one of the Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) training sites at Twentynine Palms in California. The simulation can model the behavior of the Marines (BLUFOR) and that of any opposing insurgents (OPFOR), simulating firefights, Improvised Explosive Device (IED) incidents, as well as routine patrols and civilian interactions. Squad VTB was part of DARPA’s Squad X program and was intended to test planned armaments in the Squad X program to see if they made the AI Marines more “efficient” in combat, so that better evaluations could be made on whether to fund real-world trials.

Squad VTB was developed over two years using Unreal 4 technology and could support up to 16 networked players controlling either BLURFOR or OPFOR team members, as well as a Procter, a dungeon master-esque role of an observer who could influence the action. The product supports After-Action Report functions, including detailed troop and ballistics performance metrics, full mission replay and debrief functionality, and other visual data analysis tools.

Squad VTB was put on hold in 2017 when DARPA shifted funding away from virtualizing the project and toward real-world elements of the Squad X weaponry.

The technology developed as part of Squad VTB would go on to form the foundation of several other DARPA projects at Cubic Austin, including the Prototype Resilient Operations Testbed for Expeditionary Urban Operations (PROTEUS) and Agile Teams (ATEAMS).

In 2019, Lockheed Martin approached Cubic Austin with funding to restart the development of Squad VTB to enable them to run virtual tests on their proposed Squad X armaments. This project was targeted to start in early 2020.