Washington: Venture-funded tech firm Shield AI and traditional defence prime RTX have announced that they were teaming up to put Shield software on RTX hardware.
The release touts two collaborative projects, a sensor package and an “operational weapon.”
“This collaboration reflects how the defence ecosystem is evolving — bringing the best of autonomy and hardware to bear on national security challenges,” said Shield’s new CEO, Gary Steele, in a press release point out by both firms.
The companies were cagey about the “operational weapon” project, declining to answer follow-up questions including about how much the companies are spending on these new efforts.
The press release just says “RTX will integrate Shield AI’s Hivemind to field the first operational weapon powered by Networked Collaborative Autonomy (NCA) – a breakthrough technology that fuses real-time coordination, resilience and combat-proven firepower. This work will be fully funded by the companies, without the need for government investment.”
However, Shield AI has already released a lot of information on Hivemind, one of their flagship products, which the company calls its “AI and autonomy stack.” In layman’s terms, that means it’s supposed to be a comprehensive package of AI tools and other software that can be installed on a wide range of different unmanned systems, operating on land, sea, or air — or potentially coordinating different robots working in all of these at once.
Hivemind enables the Pentagon’s preferred approach of “human-machine teaming,” a carefully chosen halfway point between old school remote control — such as the Predator drone, where two human crew dictate every action the aircraft takes — and sci-fi-style total autonomy, a Skynet-like AI that can make all the decisions on its own. The goal here is to have the humans set the objectives and give the orders, but for the AI to handle the details on its own, without needing time-consuming micromanagement via an always-on, long-distance radio link that potential enemies can detect and jam.
Shield AI built Hivemind as an highly customisable, mission-agnostic system, capable of plugging in new software modules for different tasks, environments, and types of unmanned systems. It even has a slimmed-down “Hivemind Edge” version to operate on frontline systems where computing power is limited, communications are intermittent, and GPS is rarely available.
