The Agile Condor was evidently a success, and the new contract suggests that the Air Force wants more of this. An existing Reaper would circle in place or fly back to try and re-establish communications the AI-boosted version uses its AI to navigate using landmarks and find the target area – as well as spotting threats on the ground and changing its flight path to avoid them. An Air Force slide of the Agile Condor concept of operations shows the drone losing both its communications link and GPS navigation at the start of its mission.
It also opens up the possibility of the Reaper operating on its own.
If the system detects an anomaly on the ground, warfighters are alerted within minutes, allowing them to investigate and act while it’s still relevant,” according to SRC’s page on Agile Condor. “Instead of taking hours, sometimes days or even weeks – decisions can now be made in near real-time. Agile Condor’s AI should be able to do all that instantly without needing to send the data anywhere. At the mass of data is beams back to an operations center, as far as the bandwidth allows, and then pored over to extract information. One of the key aims of Agile Condor is speeding up the PED process. Its modular architecture is built around machine learning (suggesting a lot of GPUs or other processors optimized for parallel processing) and the makers anticipate upgrades to neuromorphic computing hardware which mimics the human brain.
Built by SRC Inc, it packs the maximum computing capacity into the minimum space, with the lowest possible power requirements. Agile Condor, which has been in development by the Air Force Research Laboratory for some years, is effectively a flying supercomputer – ‘high-performance embedded computing ‘ - optimized for artificial intelligence applications.