Technology startup Shield AI on Wednesday said that it has successfully demonstrated its autonomous piloting technology in a teaming arrangement aboard three of the company’s unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and that the technology will be ready to deploy in 2024.
The use of the Hivemind artificial intelligence pilot aboard three V-BAT UAS for the autonomous teaming demonstration was the final milestone under a contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s AFWERX innovation arm and signifies that the vertical take-off-and-landing drones can be fielded in GPS and communications-denied environments within a year, Shield AI said.
V-BAT is a program of record and in 2024 Shield AI will have a modular graphics processing unit-payload that runs on Hivemind that will be available for the drones that are already fielded, Brandon Tseng, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Defense Daily in an email response to questions. The company will have a “major announcement” on this in the fourth quarter of 2023, he said.
Tseng said he is “confident there will be a number of operational units using swarming V-BATs next year.”
The announcement of the successful autonomous teaming effort followed the Defense Department’s unveiling this week of its Replicator Initiative, which aims to acquire thousands of attritable autonomous systems within two years to achieve scale and mass to counter China’s military build up (Defense Daily, Aug. 28).
Tseng said he is “bullish” on Replicator.
In the recent demonstrations, Shield AI said that the V-BAT team was used for detect, track, identify, locate, and report missions during simulated wildfires.
The demonstrations for AFWERX under the Strategic Funding Increase program, which began in spring 2022 included single-agent and three-agent V-BAT flights in simulation and real-world environments, Tseng said.
In addition to V-BAT, Tseng said that Shield AI is participating in other programs of record with deployed warfighters and is working with program offices “to get swarming and autonomy onboarded into the programs as a technology insertion point.”
There has been a sea-change in the Defense Department’s understanding of, and demand for, autonomy, Tseng said.
“From 2015-2022, we would engage at length about the role of autonomy when operating without GPS or communications, but it often did not lead to action at a material scale,” he said in the email. “After more than a year of war in Ukraine, where they are losing 10,000 drones per month due to the Russians jamming GPS and communications, it seems like everybody (senior leaders, warfighters, the program offices) understand the importance of autonomy. When we go into meetings now, the program offices say, ‘We need autonomy because GPS and communications will be jammed.’ This was not the case even a year ago, so it’s promising to see the electronic warfare problem and autonomy solution much better understood by the DoD.”
Shield AI says on its website that Hivemind works like a human pilot in that it “reacts to the battlefield” and does not need GPS or communications to make decisions.
In addition to V-BAT, Shield AI’s software has been used to pilot small quadcopter UAS and an F-16 fighter. Hivemind is based on a modular open systems architecture and can be used on other aircraft and trained for a wide range of missions such as integrated air defense breach, hunting mobile missile systems, zone reconnaissance, counter-air, strike, and maritime domain awareness.
In June, Shield AI said it has teamed with Kratos Defense & Security Solutions [KTOS] to integrate Hivemind into Kratos’ XQ-58 Valkyrie unmanned combat jet and in March the company said it signed a memorandum of understanding with Boeing [BA] to explore integrating the autonomous piloting technology into the aerospace and defense giant’s military aircraft.
“The continual application of autonomy from small systems, now V-BAT, and onto larger platforms provides paths for industry progression and autonomy maturation,” Col. Tom Meagher, AFWERX Prime Division Chief, said in a statement included in Shield AI’s press release. “The criticality of autonomous capabilities for future programs of record within the DoD was the driver for this Shield AI-AFWERX effort.”
Tseng said that V-BATs are deployed in 14 time zones and operate around-the-clock.