EpiSci Awarded DARPA Contract To Develop Tactical AI For Air Combat Evolution

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

EpiSys Science, Inc. (EpiSci) has been awarded a $7.4M, four-year contract (including options) by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop trusted Tactical Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms for individual and team-based air combat autonomy.

Leveraging EpiSci’s innovative Tactical AI technologies and its recent work in DARPA’s AlphaDogfight Trials program, EpiSci will design highly capable multi-agent solutions in support of ACE program’s technical area one, which “seeks to increase trust in combat autonomy by using human-machine collaborative dogfighting as its challenge problem.”

Tactical AI is built using a trust-first, hybrid machine learning architecture and will explicitly provide unmatched operator insight into agent functioning thereby promoting trust and situational awareness. By progressing through the same type of training and evaluation as human pilots undergo, EpiSci’s Tactical AI agents will prove themselves ready to perform direct combat autonomy roles, extending human capabilities, and freeing operators to focus on higher-level mission command responsibilities.

“EpiSci has always been focused on bringing cutting-edge machine learning and AI solutions into the real world,” said Chris Gentile, Vice President of Tactical Autonomous Systems. “Our agents meld highly capable AI with a system architecture designed for mission critical applications, with assured, bounded capability across the entire problem set. Building combat autonomy is a natural extension of our Tactical AI architecture, and we are excited to work with DARPA to increase trust in AI and improve the capability of manned-unmanned tactical aviation.”

“Being part of the DARPA ACE program is a huge testament to our Tactical AI paradigm that combines the best of both worlds: traditional expert systems and emerging deep reinforcement learning algorithms,” emphasized Bo Ryu, President of EpiSci and the Principal Investigator of the project. “We are thrilled for the opportunity provided by DARPA to demonstrate our Tactical AI for the ACE program and beyond.”

Red6 Aerospace and Northeastern University will support EpiSci’s effort in this program.