WEBINAR
From Simulation to Mission Execution: How VISE and MPMS Work Together to Enhance Mission Success
Mission planning software plays a critical role in coordinating complex operations, enabling one operator to control multiple assets while optimizing routes, assessing risks, and adapting in real time. When combined with advanced simulation capabilities, autonomous mission planning can empower operators to plan, rehearse, and execute missions with greater efficiency and confidence.
This webinar will explore how ARA’s Mission Planning and Management System (MPMS), combined with our Virtual Integration & Simulation Environment (VISE), enable operators to anticipate threats, coordinate crewed-uncrewed operations, and refine tactics in a virtual environment before real-world deployment. We will discuss how the true digital-twin mission planning environment in VISE can empower teams to conduct full mission rehearsals, predict asset responses, refine autonomous behaviors, and solve challenges before costly physical testing—while allowing for smarter, safer, and more effective cost-effective mission execution.
Topics covered include:
- How MPMS enables a single operator to perform missions across air, land, and sea with multiple heterogeneous assets, from mission planning through mission execution
- How VISE uses the true digital replication of vehicles to enable teams to test and evaluate assets in literally any environment, with any ground, air, or surface vehicle
- How, when combined, MPMS and VISE empower teams to conduct full mission rehearsals; predict asset responses, refine autonomous behaviors, and solve challenges before real-world deployment.
July 16, 2025 | 12-1 PM EDT
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Speaker – Robert Belle-Isle
Mr. Robert Belle-Isle is a Senior Robotics Software Engineer and the Simulation Team Lead at ARA’s Neya Systems Division. Since joining ARA in 2021, Belle-Isle has been a core developer and is the architect of VISE, a digital platform for testing, training and validating active AI systems such as off-road autonomy. During his time at ARA, Belle-Isle has worked on numerous efforts to integrate autonomy systems with vehicles in both real and simulated worlds. For project contributions, Mr. Belle-Isle, on the DARPA RACER program, developed a testing framework for high-speed off-road autonomous missions using a simulation platform integrated with the ARL Phoenix autonomy stack. He also has developed the architecture required to train reinforcement learning based autonomous systems using digital twins for same-day vehicle deployment in the real world. Currently, Mr. Belle-Isle is leading development on the next generation update to VISE, pushing ARA’s high-fidelity and real-time simulation capabilities into new frontiers and helping solidify ARA’s Neya Systems Division as a top contender in the race to generating synthetic data for training AI.
Belle-Isle received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern Maine in 2020. He earned a M.S in Engineering, with a focus on robotics, from Steven’s Institute of Technology in 2021.
Speaker – Jeff Hyams
Jeff Hyams is the Mission Planning Group Lead at ARA’s Neya Systems Division. He has been a senior robotics software engineer since 2012 and was recently promoted to Principal Robotics Engineer. Jeff has extensive expertise with mission planning, open standards, and architectures. He has been working in mobile robotics since attending graduate school in the late 1990s, where he earned an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of South Florida while researching applications of marsupial robots for Urban Search and Rescue. He has extensive experience with JAUS and UCS standards and has served as an active member of both SAE AS-4 working groups. Jeff served as the task group lead for the AS-4UCS multi-domain extensions that extended the official SAE UCS model with maritime and ground domains. He also led efforts to demonstrate the viability of the Universal Tactical Controller architecture, an open systems design for creating a common controller for unmanned ground systems. Jeff has been a part of the development of the Mission Planning and Management System for his entire career at ARA’s Neya Systems Division and has been the Mission Planning Lead for the entire system for more than 7 years.
