The Pentagon is pursuing two new contracts through its Collaborative Combat Aircraft project to develop AI-guided drones to supplement manned jets.
Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril Industries are competing for the contracts, which aim to add over 1,000 new drones to the Air Force.
Boeing has showcased its Ghost Bat entry, while Anduril has demonstrated its AI-powered Roadrunner jet drone.
Roadrunner-M, “can rapidly launch, identify, intercept and destroy a wide variety of aerial threats or be safely recovered and relaunched at near-zero cost,” Anduril stated.
“The flights demonstrate the company’s commitment to maturing its CCA ecosystem for Autonomous Collaborative Platform (ACP) UAS using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML),” General Atomics wrote. “This provides a new and innovative tool for next-generation military platforms to make decisions under dynamic and uncertain real-world conditions.”
General Atomics has promoted its Avenger drone system paired with “digital twin” aircraft to conduct autonomous collaborative missions.
It revealed tests as early as late 2022. Lockheed Martin integrated AI to operate its VISTA training plane autonomously for 17 hours in early 2023.
“The concepts demonstrated by these flights set the standard for operationally relevant mission systems capabilities on CCA platforms,” General Atomics’ Senior Director of Advanced Programs Michael Atwood, said.
“The combination of airborne high-performance computing, sensor fusion, human-machine teaming and AI pilots making decisions at the speed of relevance shows how quickly GA-ASI’s capabilities are maturing as we move to operationalize autonomy for CCAs,” Atwood added.
“VISTA will allow us to parallelize the development and test of cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques with new uncrewed vehicle designs,” M. Christopher Cotting, U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School director of research, said.
“This approach, combined with focused testing on new vehicle systems as they are produced, will rapidly mature autonomy for uncrewed platforms and allow us to deliver tactically relevant capability to our warfighter.”
The contracts seek to leverage AI and autonomy to provide cheaper expendable drones to support manned aircraft and military innovation.
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