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Race for aerial autonomy
Trends in autonomy will reshape drone capabilities and concepts, making them more offensively useful and even harder to defend against. Military drones are remote-controlled aircraft of various sizes designed to perform tasks deemed too dull, dirty, or dangerous for human troops.
This pressure towards aerial supremacy has lead different countries into a race towards a dominance in autonomous aerial combat. Among them are:
Japan
Japan has begun to develop unmanned, remote-controlled fighter aircraft capable of breakneck maneuvers that will be deployed as early as 2035, bracing for further advancements in China’s military technologies and the rise of drone warfare. Japan ministry is planning to deploy fighter drones in three stages:
- Remote controlled operation
- Collaborative operation, where one manned vehicle is assisted by a fleet of unmanned vehicles
- Full autonomous operation
United States of America
ACE program’s objective is to develop trusted, scalable, human-level, AI-driven autonomy for air combat by using human-machine collaborative operation. DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program is half way through Phase 1 and has achieved: advanced virtual AI dogfights involving both within visual range (WVR) and beyond visual…
