Matthew Nelson
General Atomics’ aeronautical systems business has secured a contract of undisclosed value to test a high-performance computing framework built by the Air Force Research Laboratory through the use of the MQ-9 Reaper aircraft.
The U.S. Air Force aims to use the flight test to assess the Agile Condor technology and validate applicable machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches that will work to locate and trace targets, the company said Monday.
Designed to potentially lower satellite bandwidth requirements through the automatic classification, nomination and validation of targets, the Agile Condor will be incorporated over a period of 10 months.
“The Agile Condor project will further enhance RPA effectiveness by specifically allowing an MQ-9 to surveil a large area of operations, autonomously identify pre-defined targets of interest and transmit their locations,†said David Alexander, president at General Atomics' aeronautical systems business.
