We’ve heard of forward-deployed engineers and manufacturing, but now Applied Intuition wants to make autonomy testing mobile.
Earlier this week, autonomy giant Applied Intuition rolled out Edge, a “mobile operations center” designed to facilitate the development, testing, and operation of autonomous systems at, well, the edge.
Sim-er down: We’ve covered Applied Intuition before, but as a refresher, the California-based startup (can a company with a $15B valuation be classified as a startup?) offers both simulation and autonomy software through their Axion and Acuity platforms.
Edge, according to Applied, focuses on Axion Sim and Mission Control:
- Axion Sim: Applied’s “development cloud” designed to offer high-fidelity, all-domain simulated environments for companies—and the government—to test and train different autonomous systems.
- Mission Control: An off-board mission-level command, control, and software-development environment for autonomous vehicles that enables live operation or live-virtual-constructive (LVC) testing.
On the Edge: The testing unit—housed in a shipping container-esque box—comes packed with its own edge compute, satellite and radio comms, and autonomy testing and sim infrastructure to make it deployable to all the far-flung places autonomous system companies—especially defense-focused ones—are validating their tech in the field.
Out of the lab: The logic behind Edge is pretty straightforward: The infrastructure supporting autonomous defense systems needs to keep pace with software development, and test sites are designed for hardware and lack forward-deployable DevSecOps environments.
“Between test events, everything goes cold. Data doesn’t carry over, infrastructure gets torn down, engineers waste days rebuilding,” Applied’s GM for Defense Jason Brown told Tectonic. “Government ranges weren’t designed for modern software-first autonomy workflows.”
Hot in herre: Applied’s goal is to take the autonomy show on the road and “close that gap with a persistent environment that stays hot between events,” he added.
- It comes with self-sufficient power, HVAC, compute servers, Starlink-enabled comms, and operator workstations.
- It’s designed for “multi-domain autonomous systems, air, sea, and ground. UAVs, USVs, UGVs,” Brown said. “Any platform where teams need to iterate on autonomy software in the field, not just test hardware.”
- Customers can buy, lease, or operate the unit “as part of a managed range,” and the business model is “designed around getting Axion into the field.”
In practice, for example, that might look like a team running a multi-day flight test campaign planning missions, replaying test logs, assessing and validating autonomy behavior, and running simulations in the field “instead of shipping data back to a lab and waiting weeks for analysis.”
Ready to roll: Despite this week’s announcement, the mobile autonomy unit is up and running, according to the company. Brown said Edge is currently being used for one of Applied’s “own autonomous flight development” and another unit is “deployed with a defense customer now.”