DARPA to brief industry on ACE manned/unmanned dogfighting programme

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is moving ahead with its Air Combat Evolution (ACE) programme to develop manned/unmanned air-to-air combat capabilities, with an industry day announced on 6 May.

An illustrative concept for the Skyborg UAV released by the USAF. DARPA is exploring using such ‘loyal wingmen’ in the air-to-air combat role, with control coming from manned aircraft. (US Air Force)

The ‘Proposers Day’, which is to be held on 17 May, will inform industry on the ACE programme and promote additional discussion on the topic, which is geared at developing the technologies needed for the pilot of a manned aircraft to dogfight against adversaries by using unmanned ‘loyal wingmen’.

“ACE will apply existing artificial intelligence [AI] technologies to the dogfight problem in experiments of increasing realism. In parallel, ACE will implement methods to measure, calibrate, increase, and predict human trust in combat autonomy performance. Finally, the programme will scale the tactical application of automating a dogfight to more complex, heterogeneous, multi-aircraft, operational level simulated scenarios informed by live data, laying the groundwork for future live, campaign-level experimentation,” the agency said.

As noted by DARPA, in a future air domain contested by adversaries, a single human pilot can increase his or her lethality by effectively orchestrating multiple semi-autonomous, intelligent unmanned platforms from within the manned aircraft.

“This shifts the human role from sole operator to system mission commander,” DARPA said, adding. “In particular, ACE aims to deliver a capability that enables a pilot to attend to a broader, more global air command mission while their aircraft and teamed unmanned systems are engaged in individual tactics”.