In a press release on April 10, Duality AI announced that it has received a contract award from the U.S. Army’s XM30 Program Office to assist the development of next generation C-UAS capabilities.
The Program Office is responsible for the development of the XM30 that will replace the M2 Bradley and serve as the Army’s next-generation combat vehicle. In response to the threat posed to personnel and troops by drones, the vehicle will include a counter-drone AI Target Detection and Recognition (AiTDR) system.
To achieve this, the Army Research Lab will collaborate with the Army’s Project Linchpin team to leverage synthetic data generated in simulation from virtual sensors within Duality’s Falcon sim platform.
It is hoped that the usage of digital twin simulation within the initial development of the AiTDR system will enable shorter timelines and lower costs of field deployment. In response to the contract award, Duality AI Chief Product Officer Michael Taylor noted:
“Falcon’s complete control over simulation environments gives the Army ability to train and test the AiTDR model in complex conditions, explore varied drone detection scenarios, and validate potential solutions in simulation before the physical hardware is even ready for field testing.”
The use of digital twin simulation enables the Army to produce a virtual representation of the AiTDR system and see how it responds to drone threats with a number of variables adjusted, for example the speed of the vehicle, the weather conditions and the drone itself.
Theoretically, this could mitigate the fact that as it stands the performance of C-UAS systems can vary from testing in optimized conditions to the outcome in challenging operational environments.
The recent contract awards marks a significant step in the U.S. Army’s commitment to digital engineering, which Jennifer Swanson, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Data, Engineering & Software, described as the “linchpin of all the digital transformation efforts that we have ongoing today” in June 2024.
Post Image Credit: Raytheon
