LONDON – AI and autonomy companies in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are already feverishly developing and launching tools to collect more and more data and then help operators make sense of an environment of information overload.
They hope that all this work will soon lead to contracts at home and with allies, as more details about the second phase of the trilateral AUKUS deal, focused on advanced technology, come to light this fall.
Little has been formally revealed about the effort. The AUKUS collaboration was announced in September 2021, and in March 2023, top leaders from the three nations met in California to reveal plans for the Pillar 1 focused on nuclear-powered submarines – first involving UK and US vessels operating from an Australian base, then Australia buying US submarines as a stopgap solution, and then the nations collaborating on a specific AUKUS attack submarine for the UK and Australia to follow build and operate.
Pillar 2 is believed to cover critical technologies: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonics, autonomy and more.
US Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu told reporters last month. I expected President Joe Biden to announce more details this fall.
However, AI developers are confident that they will benefit from whatever the final plan is.
“We see ourselves: although we are a British company, we are an ally-first company, as we call it. So we see the AUKUS opportunity as really the ability for us to deploy what we consider to be a critical and strategically critical capability not only for the UK but also for our allies,” said Adarga CEO Rob Bassett Cross. , to Defense News during the company’s demonstration of its Vantage. AI-based decision-making tool at DSEI 2023 defense exhibition in London.
Even without the final details of Pillar 2, one Australian company is already seeing profits as it tries to secure domestic sales.
Michael Partridge, CEO of Australian drone builder SYPAQ, told Defense News that his government was already in the midst of evolving its approach to helping small businesses not only develop new technologies but also get them into the hands of warfighters for experimentation and under contract to procurement officials, as part of its recent Strategic Defense Review. . The impending AUKUS Pillar 2 agreement has further aided SYPAQ’s efforts to engage in serious talks about doing business with the government.
“The conversations are markedly different,” he said. “What we are seeing is government agencies aligning themselves with the objectives of the AUKUS pillar, and that in itself just changes the narrative a little bit. “That is why we are starting to have conversations about common outcomes between different government agencies based on the AUKUS objectives.”
Instead of trying to sell a new technology in a bubble, without any context, “if you can align with the objectives of those pillars of AUKUS, this tends to align conversations between different government agencies. “We’re just finding out – it’s only been a year or two – but it’s definitely having a huge influence on how people perceive how they would deliver technologies.”
What are the industrial bases doing?
AUKUS is expected to introduce some legislative and policy changes that will greatly facilitate the exchange of technological innovations and the sale of systems between the three countries.
Although that is yet to happenSome companies are already gravitating toward partnerships with industrial bases in other AUKUS nations.
Sensitive vision systems, for example.
The Australian company developed the ViDAR sensor, a visual detection and ranging sensor intended to complement radar by conducting an optical search of an area and using artificial intelligence to help identify elements of interest: small boats or even people in the water, vehicles in movement or people. on land, etc.
Although not affiliated with AUKUS, Sentient Vision Systems business development director Paul Harris said the company is already closely linked with American and British organizations in an effort to develop a ViDAR payload for the Stalker drone, a small group 2 unmanned aerial system.
In 2021, Sentient Vision participated in an overseas benchmarking event with the US Marine Corps, where Marines favorably evaluated the ViDAR payload on the Stalker drone.
Now, Sentient Vision is in close talks with Edge Autonomy, the original equipment manufacturer of the Stalker drone, although it is sold in the US through Lockheed Martin, to further refine the small ViDAR payload and make it part of the sales pitch for Stalker drones in the United States. Europe and the whole world.
Harris said Sentient Vision was also in talks with US company Shield AI to develop a ViDAR payload for its V-BAT drone, as well as to improve ViDAR performance with the integration of Shield AI’s Hivemind AI technology.
“It’s going to be a really interesting journey ahead. Firstly, from AUKUS’ perspective, we all come from countries with a similar set of values. We all have similar operational challenges. And the Australian Defense Force and the US Department of Defense work closely together in the Indo-Pacific, in particular,” Harris said.
Not only do the navies operate together in the Pacific, but the Australian military and the US Marine Corps have been closely linked as the Australians establish an amphibious warfare capability of their own.
Harris said this “natural camaraderie at the national level” will certainly open doors, but so will policy changes related to AUKUS, such as one the US Congress is considering that would allow Australian and British technology to be considered of origin. national, something for which today only Canada qualifies.
These legislative changes “will make it easier for Australian companies to do business in the United States. I think the United States is very receptive to partnering with Australia, and AUKUS only amplifies that favorable environment,” Harris said.
Adarga is also thinking about doing business through AUKUS. Cross said his company already has a small team in the US and is now setting up a small office in Australia.
AUKUS promises a closer operational link between the three nations, and specifically their navies, as they operate in the Pacific to maintain peace and deter Chinese aggression.
Cross said Vantage was a must-have tool for allies going forward. What wasn’t said was that the tool could extract three different data sets to create even better results, if nations can achieve their information-sharing agreements under AUKUS.
Vantage is an AI-powered decision-making aid. Cross is a military veteran who said that during his deployments, “we often acted without the knowledge we needed. It’s not that we lacked data, even then; we had a huge amount,” Cross said. “We just didn’t have the time or tools to make sense of it all. “We had all the pieces of the puzzle, so to speak, but we were rarely able to put them all together in time to get a clear and dynamic understanding of our operating environment.”
Vantage, which has already been offered to Adarga’s existing military, government and commercial customers and, as of this week, is available to a broader customer base, consistently accepts internal and open source documents of all types and formats to Build your information base.
A report can then be requested from the system: “From the growing Russian influence in Mali, what is the threat to the stability of the region?”, offered as an example product manager Ollie Carmichael during the September 13 demonstration at DSEI .
Question and answer function
He showed how Vantage first displayed a list of people and organizations of interest to this topic, all of which could be investigated further, and then a visual representation of how the people, events and places were connected, in relation to the topic of Russia. influence in Mali.
Carmichael also showed off a Q&A feature for more specific questions, where a user may need a fact buried in an old report that can’t be easily accessed, but that Vantage can find and report back to in minutes.
“Whatever its role, the challenge is the same: information is dispersed in silos, in different systems and in inaccessible sources,” he said.
Cross said its AI tools are used by all three UK services and Strategic Command, as are commercial clients who need to know more about non-financial risks to their businesses and how geopolitical events and factors could impact them.
He said he hopes to expand the customer base soon.
“We have been talking about this for some time. The technology is already here,” he said, and he is ready to sell it to American and Australian buyers.
Megan Eckstein is a naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, focusing on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs and budgets. She has reported on four geographic fleets and is happiest when she presents stories from a ship. Megan is an alumnus of the University of Maryland.
Discover more from PressNewsAgency
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.