UK and allies use AI drones in battlefield exercise for first time

Britain, the United States and Australia have tested autonomous drones using artificial intelligence to scan the battlefield and spot enemy vehicles to destroy as part of an Aukus project.
Scientists from the highly secretive Porton Down laboratory in Wiltshire deployed a swarm of drones alongside an American quadcopter and Australian drone to simulate an attack from armoured vehicles.
The drones had to search an area and operate under their own control to find targets. Troops from the three countries used AI to process the information and sift through imagery to identify targets. They shared detections, so they were working together with data from a much larger area and were able to respond much faster than without the help of AI.
The groundbreaking exercise, which took place this year at Fort Irwin, California, is the first use by Britain and its allies of autonomy and AI sensing systems in a real-time military environment. It is one of the first important projects under way as part of the Aukus pact, which has so far focused primarily on building new submarines.
Commodore Rachel Singleton, head of the defence AI centre and the UK lead on developing AI capabilities for Aukus, said the partnership was key to ensuring that systems designed by each nation were “interoperable” in the future.
“Service personnel from one nation will be supported by capabilities that have been developed across all three nations,” she said.
About 500 British Army personnel were deployed on the project, named Project Convergence, including those from the Ranger Regiment, a special operations-capable unit that is sent to locations across the world, many of which are secret.
As part of the trial, the UK sent a swarm of drones, including two Red Kites and six Ghosts, all developed by Blue Bear, the technology company.
The Red Kite drone can be launched from a strip of grass and travel up to 60 miles carrying a payload of up to 5kg. The Ghost drones had previously taken part in the largest military-focused trial of drone swarms in the UK, involving 20 drones working together.
The Americans had three drones operating as part of the trial, two of which were the Altius-600 developed by Anduril, the defence company, and could be used as kamikaze loitering munitions to attack high-value targets with a 3kg warhead.
Skywalker X8, which can be bought on the internet for several hundred pounds, was used by the Australians.
The drones operated in the same airspace under one team, which had deployed AI onto the equipment so it could assess the threat without the need for as much input from troops on the ground. They were able to “seamlessly” exchange data, according to the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, otherwise known as Porton Down.