Weapon-mounted sensors track troops as they train.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.
• Position: Modeling and Simulation

* To prepare troops for combat, the Army and Marine Corps have been building large urban training facilities that resemble villages in Iraq and Afghanistan. As soldiers and Marines run through the course, instructors keep tabs on the action by video cameras and other sensors installed throughout the rooms. But these technologies capture a limited field of view. Trainers want to know exactly where each unit member is at all times, where the weapons and sights are pointed, and what position the person is in when he fires.

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"That tracking technology is what we're developing so that they can get more information from these training exercises," says Mike Donfrancesco, vice president of sales and marketing at InterSense Inc, a Bedford, Mass.-based company that manufactures motion-tracking hardware frequently used in flight simulators and weapons trainers.

The company has been awarded a small business innovation research grant to develop a system to track soldiers and Marines as they proceed through the course. The optical-inertial system would fit on the...