General Atomics flies UAS missions with AI pilots
GA-ASI's flights took advantage of its reinforcement learning architecture. (Photo: GA-ASI)
A GA-ASI-owned Avenger UAS was paired with a digital twin aircraft to conduct live, virtual, and constructive combat missions autonomously.
General Atomic Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) has advanced its Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) ecosystem by flying three missions with artificially intelligent (AI) pilots.
The flights took place on 14 December from GA-ASI’s Desert Horizons flight operations facility as a demonstration of its commitment to maturing the CCA ecosystem for Autonomous Collaborative Platform (ACP) UAS using AI and Machine Learning (ML).
The flights took advantage of GA-ASI’s reinforcement learning (RL) architecture, with agents demonstrating single, multi and hierarchical behaviours.
The single-agent model navigated a live aircraft while avoiding threats. Multi-agent RL models flew a live and virtual Avenger UAS collaboratively to chase a target and avoid threats.
Finally, the hierarchical RL agent used sensor information to select courses of action based of its understanding of the environment.
GA-ASI said this demonstrated the AI pilot’s ability to process and act on real-time information independently of a human operator.
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