US and UK research labs collaborate on autonomy and artificial intelligence

The Air Force Research Laboratory, in partnership with UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, have demonstrated for the first time the ability for the U.S. and the UK to jointly develop, select, train, and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms in support of the Armed Forces of each of the two nations.

This research is designed to support adjacent, collaborating, U.S. and UK brigades with enduring wide-area situational awareness, which aims to improve decision-making, increase operational tempo, reduce risk to life, and reduce manpower burden.

The event was made possible by a UK and U.S. Partnership Agreement concerning autonomy and artificial intelligence collaboration established in December 2020.

"We are dedicated to getting robotics and autonomous systems capability into the hands of the warfighters," said Dr. Robert W. Sadowski, U.S. Army DEVCOM. "Advances in robotics and autonomy will make our formations more capable and mission-ready while providing protection to our warfighters through unprecedented stand-off while enabling enhanced lethality on the battlefield."

The four-year partnership agreement includes objectives to accelerate joint UK/U.S. development and sharing of AI technology and capabilities, with the agreement spanning from foundational research in test verification and validation to AI algorithm research and development, to joint experiments advancing Joint All Domain Command and Control capabilities of both nations.

"The October 18 event demonstrated how the UK and U.S. can integrate AI technology to create the first end to end Machine Learning research, development, and deployment ecosystem enabling rapid data sharing, algorithm development, evaluation, and deployment. AI will play a critical role in accelerating decision making to meet the pace and scale of the future battlespace," said Dr. Lee M. Seversky, AFRL lead for the demonstration and the U.S. Project Agreement.

During the demonstration, the simulated scenario focused on how the UK and U.S. can cooperate and share AI capabilities to support the "Close" fight where both countries operate in adjacent areas and can share data, AI algorithms, and capability tightly during mission execution.

The demonstration brought together key technologies from the UK in the form of Model Cards, which are able to present to a commander the ability to quickly understand, explore, and select appropriate ML models from many to deploy in mission, and U.S. StreamlinedML which is a government owned, extensible, open platform to quickly build ML workflows, train and evaluate ML models, and deploy them regardless of the source or ML software stack use - taking advantage of the best of breed ML technology spanning commercial, academia and government.

Dstl's Todd Robinson heads up the UK element to the project, and said, "This collaboration with AFRL and the US services is crucial to drive the very latest AI technology into military operations and innovative research in both nations. The demonstration is just the first step toward our ambition of deploying novel AI that can learn in the field into an experimental trial environment, something that hasn't been done before and is only possible due to this collaboration."

The demonstration successfully showed the integration of 15 state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, 12 UK and U.S. datasets, 5 automated ML workflows for training and retraining models based on mission needs, and the ability deploy the models as a service to target end users and platforms.