The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is seeking information from industry to help identify potential sources to conduct technical work for artificial intelligence (AI) mission management and flight autonomy, according to a request for information (RFI) issued last week.
As part of its mission, AFRL tackles a range of challenges designed to improve mission operations. This includes advancing low-level flight control to enable tighter and riskier maneuvers than human pilots can achieve, as well as facilitating autonomous team coordination and onboard battle management.
The RFI seeks expertise to enhance AI and autonomy capabilities for perceiving mission space, generating action options, executing those options, and evaluating performance for teams of aircraft.
“There’s a critical need for explainable and transparent autonomous decision-making by uncrewed agents,” the RFI explains.
Moreover, as the U.S. Air Force focuses on peer and near-peer adversaries, it is increasingly looking to utilize autonomous platforms.
“Modular autonomy software development will enable platforms in crewed-uncrewed and uncrewed-uncrewed teaming warfare to extend and multiply the warfighters’ reach into contested environments,” the RFI reads.
To ensure robotic platforms can follow mission commands and make critical decisions independently in future battlefields, AFRL requires advanced autonomous software that improves battlefield awareness and decision-making, going beyond basic functionalities, according to the RFI.
Due to this need, the RFI is looking for “expertise to support the maturation of AI, the autonomy capabilities for perceiving and analyzing the mission space, generating and selecting/suggesting courses of action, executing the action, and evaluating mission performance for teams of aircraft.”
Responses to the RFI are due by 3 p.m. EST on Oct. 23.
