AI Slays Top F-16 Pilot In DARPA Dogfight Simulation
AI Slays Top F-16 Pilot In DARPA Dogfight Simulation
"It's a giant leap," said DARPA's
Justin (call sign "Glock") Mock.
Heron Systems’ AI pilot
scores the final kill against AF F-16 instructor “Banger” in AlphaDogfight
Trials
WASHINGTON: In a 5 to 0
sweep, an AI ‘pilot’ developed by Heron Systems beat one of the Air Force’s top
F-16 fighter pilots in DARPA’s simulated aerial dogfight contest today.
“It’s a giant leap,” said
DARPA’s Justin (call sign “Glock”) Mock, who served as a commentator on the
trials.
AI still has a long way to go
before the Air Force pilots would be ready to hand over the stick to an
artificial intelligence during combat, DARPA officials said during today’s live broadcast of
the AlphaDogfight
trials. But the three-day trials show that AI systems can credibly
maneuver an aircraft in a simple, one-on-one combat scenario and shoot its
forward guns in a classic, WWII-style dogfight. On the other hand, they said,
it was an impressive showing by an AI agent after only a year of development. (As
I reported earlier this week, the program began back in September last year
with eight teams developing their respective AIs.)
Heron, a small, female- and
minority-owned company with offices in Maryland and Virginia, builds artificial
intelligence agents, and is also a player in DARPA’s
Gamebreaker effort to explore tactics for disrupting enemy strategies
using real-world games as platforms. The company beat eight other teams,
including one led by defense giant Lockheed Martin — which came in second in
the AlphaDogfight “semi-finals” that pitted the AI pilots against each other
this morning.
Heron’s team did a
live-stream Q&A on Youtube. “Even a week before Trial 1, we had agents that
were not very good at flying at all. We really turned it around, and since then
we’ve been really number one,” said Ben Bell, Heron’s co-lead for the project.
The team intends to publish later this year some of the details about its
reinforcement learning process for the AI, he said.
The trials were designed as a
risk-reduction effort for DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program to flesh
out how human and machine pilots share operational control of a fighter jet to
maximize its chances of mission success. The overarching ACE concept is aimed
at allowing the pilot to shift “from single platform operator to mission
commander” in charge not just of flying their own aircraft but managing teams
of drones slaved to their fighter jet. “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,”
the ACE
program website explains.
Heron Systems’ AI was
extremely aggressive in the games, with its AI pilot consistently able to turn
and score killing hits on the simulated F-16 piloted by an unnamed Air Force
pilot, with the call sign “Banger,” a graduate of the Air Force’s highly
selective Weapons School at Nellis AFB. The AI exhibited “superhuman aiming
ability” during the simulation, Mock said.
While the trials were not in
anyway “definitive” of an AI pilot’s future capabilities or even its viability,
Mock said, at the same time “what we saw was that in this limited area, in this
specific scenario, we’ve got AI that works.”
DARPA intends to take the
simulator used in the trials, and the simulations, to Nellis, where other Air
Force pilots can take a stab at trying to beat AI pilots. Next steps will be to
move on to testing AI pilots’ capabilities to perform other types of aerial
combat missions.
Somewhere, the infamous Red
Baron is no doubt laughing in amazement.
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