In early December, The Center of Excellence for Advanced Technology Aerial Firefighting (CoE) staff attended the TAK Offsite in Colorado Springs. This conference was led by the US Special Operations Command's TAK Product Center, which coordinates development of the Team Awareness Kit or TAK app for military and first responder communities.
The conference was attended by over 1300 participants. CoE Wildland Fire Projects Manager Brad Schmidt presented on work conducted by the CoE and US Forest Service over the past two years to pilot the TAK app as a location tracking and common operating picture system for wildland firefighters. More information about this pilot project work can be found here: https://arcg.is/9eS0i
CoE staff attended several presentations at the TAK Offsite, and learned about the best practices to create large-scale TAK systems to link thousands of first responders across large geographic areas, as well as advanced sensors and augmented reality viewers that can be integrated with TAK. The CoE will work to incorporate these lessons learned into future work with TAK.
