DoD awards Shield AI contract for software to bolster Army aviation capabilities

SAN DIEGO -  Shield AI announced that it has been awarded a $7.2M Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract by the United States Air Force through the AFWERX innovation program. The Phase II contract will allow Shield AI to partner with the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office to deliver artificial intelligence capabilities to reduce the risk and increase the effectiveness and lethality of US Army aviation units operating in contested and GPS-denied environments.

The contract consists of a work plan to apply reinforcement learning (RL) to the development and advancement of fully autonomous behaviors for teams of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), enabling those platforms to team with human warfighters to gain, maintain, and extend access to highly contested and complex environments through persistent airborne ISR.

This effort will initially focus on reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) mission profiles in GPS-denied environments and will scale in complexity to support a variety of DoD operational concepts. The development of the RL architecture and application to UAVs will dramatically improve the velocity of AI algorithm development, which will, in turn, accelerate the maturation schedule of intelligent fixed-wing platforms from simulation to operationalized platforms.