Northrop Grumman has selected six defense tech companies as the first group of participants in a new program aimed at developing and deploying autonomous flight software quicker.
Applied Intuition, Autonodyne, Merlin, Red 6, Shield AI and SoarTech will use Northrop’s Beacon ecosystem to test their offerings and see how they perform during a series of flight demonstrations planned for later this year.
These companies will work with a Scaled Composite Model 437 Vanguard aircraft, which has digitally-engineered wings and software both supplied by Northrop. That aircraft can be modified for optionally-autonomous flight.
“Beacon is about collaboration across industry between companies of all sizes and expertise,” Tom Jones, president of Northrop’s aeronautics systems segment, said in a release Wednesday. “By providing open access to the Beacon ecosystem, we’re enhancing the innovation, new competition and ultimately the autonomous capabilities that industry can deliver to our customers.”
Beacon also apparently represents something new for Northrop. In a July 22 earnings call, Northrop’s chief executive Kathy Warden said this concept of sharing its experience and knowledge in autonomy with other industry partners “isn’t something we typically would have done in the past.”
The nature of autonomous flight arguably warrants this kind of collaboration, given the mix of hardware with software and how the latter often is where the heart of the action is.
For Beacon specifically, Northrop is looking to work off its experience of more than 500,000 autonomous flight hours and in working with government reference architectures.
“This idea of being able to provide very high fidelity physics-based models is something our company does very well. Many small companies don’t have that insight and yet they have good ideas on software or hardware that can be applied, and need to be tested, and run up against both threat scenarios and operating conditions to see how they will perform,” Warden told investors on the call.
“Beacon is a testbed that allows that to happen, and we’ve signed a number of partners to come and work with us in that integrated environment so we can learn together and really inform ourselves and the government on what the right mix and set of solutions are for autonomous vehicles.”
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