AUKUS Partners Hail Progress On AI And Autonomous Systems

Army units from the US, UK, and Australia have been collaborating to enhance the way their autonomous and AI-enabled sensors and drone systems communicate and work together.

Under AUKUS Pillar II - the aspect of the tri-nation pact seeking to develop advanced capabilities - experts from all three nations successfully deployed autonomous and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled sensing systems during the Resilient and Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Technology (RAAIT) trials earlier this year, as per a new US DoD press release.

The trials took place at multinational Project Convergence exercises hosted by the U.S Army. Military personnel from the three AUKUS nations tested cutting-edge autonomous and AI-enabled sensing capabilities in a multi-domain battlespace - land, maritime, air and cyber - that minimize the time between sensing enemy targets, deciding how to respond, and reacting.

One such system deployed at RAAIT was a plug-in for the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK) – a map-based software application– that helped a UK RedKite Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) detect opposing force locations using on-the-fly adjustments based on the data collected, while another UAV provided detailed imagery as confirmation. 

The information was passed to the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) where a uniformed "AI officer" provided human oversight prior to triggering an Australian XT-8 UAV to perform a simulated strike.

"It used to be that each nation used its own datasets to develop separate models and deploy those models on their own platforms. Under RAAIT, we’ve matured the AI pipeline, focusing on interchangeability and interoperability, which allows for any combinations of datasets, models, algorithms and platforms to be used across all three nations," said Dr. Kimberly Sablon, the Principal Director of Trusted Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

"Our goal is to get to the point where we have a pipeline that is interchangeable and interoperable but robust," Dr. Sablon said. "Being able to collect data, train our AI systems, conduct testing and evaluation and even adapt to unanticipated threats in less than 10-hours at the edge is a huge milestone for our partnership."

The statement claimed that the trials demonstrated "significant progress" since the first AUKUS RAAIT trails in the UK in April 2023.

Read more on the US DoD website