DARPA & Lockheed Team Up For AI-Enabled Weapons & Drones

By Jim Morris, Warrior Vice President, News

Lockheed Martin is teaming up with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the next stage of an artificial intelligence program involving drones.

Lockheed was awarded a $4.6 million contract to develop AI tools for dynamic airborne missions as part of the agency’s Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements (AIR) program. Over an 18-month period, the company will use AI and machine learning techniques to build surrogate models of aircraft, sensors, electronic warfare and weapons. The goal is to provide advanced modeling and simulation approaches for live, multi-ship beyond- visual-range missions.

AIR was unveiled in November, 2022 and is scheduled to last four years. Its mission is to build tools for achieving what DARPA calls “dominant tactical autonomy” – in other words, for US drones to have the upper hand in aerial combat. The plan is for tools to be developed and tested on “human-on-the-loop” F-16s and then eventually moved to drones.

A DARPA notice to developers said AIR would address two technical areas: creating fast and accurate models that capture uncertainty and automatically improve with more data, and developing AI-driven algorithmic approaches which enable real-time distributed autonomous tactical execution within uncertain, dynamic and complex operational environments.

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Lockheed will use its ARISE system for the DARPA project. The company describes ARISE as a family of integrated toolkits that are used to build a weapon simulation tool. Lockheed says it allows developers to build a fight simulation in two to three months, instead of two years as in the past.