Blue Bear Hyper Enabled Soldier System (HESS)

Blue Bear (BB) recently announced the release of their pioneering Hyper Enabled Soldier System (HESS) concept. This system will deliver wearable innovative technology to the next generation of warfighters and as a capability will empower them to maintain their battlefield edge over potential future adversaries within all domains.

The Hyper Enabled Soldier System is underpinned by Blue Bear’s open architecture capability called SmartConnectTM which acts as a Smart Soldier Hub for all elements of this system, whilst being the individual interface enabler that is also integrated with Blue Bears edge processing.

Through the SmartConnect device the soldiers’ on-body sensors are made available to the wider swarm and in parallel the wider swarm’s capability becomes available to the soldier and decision makers to exploit for full battlefield effect. This process will optimise an operator’s sensor, decider and effector chain whilst allowing all decisions to be made at ‘Machine speed’ therefore reducing the enemies ability to react to counter these decisions.

The broader battlefield picture created by the above integration is then fused into Blue Bear’s CenturionTM C2 system, whilst the tactical C2 is delivered through Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK). This end-to-end operational interface places the military operator in the same digital operating picture as all other multi-domain vehicles and assets, therefore providing military decision makers the ability to co-ordinate all military elements and assets quickly by allowing them to ‘See through the battlefield’ at any given moment.

When discussing the HASS project Blue Bear’s Managing Director Ian Williams Wynn said ‘Historic and current global conflicts have created a battlefield environment that is congested, confusing and very difficult for both the operator and military leaders to co-ordinate rapid, accurate and decisive kinetic effect to grasp the advantage from the enemy. Blue Bears Hyper enabled Soldier System will empower military operators and decision makers the ability to rapidly cultivate battlefield data and integrate it quickly and efficiently to other assets and platforms across any battlefield environment.’

Jon Longstaff – lead engineer on the HASS project said “Project HASS’ ambition from the very beginning was to deliver an innovative system that can make the human-machine interface closer than ever within a complex battlefield environment.

This system will increase Command and Control (C2) exponentially.”