Way, way back in February (we were so young, so innocent), we wrote about autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition acquiring EpiSci, which builds autonomy software for everything from drones, to planes, to boats. Well, it seems the first fruits of the acquisition have been born.
On Tuesday, the company unveiled two hot new defense product lines: Axion and Acuity.
The former—Axion—is a development suite designed to help everyone from governments to start-up defense tech companies build out their autonomy software. And the latter—Acuity—is Applied Intuition’s own out-of-the-box autonomy software, built on top of EpiSci’s tech, which can be plugged into everything from tanks to fighter jets.
“This is an acknowledgment that vehicle intelligence for warfighters needed a dedicated family of products built on commercial best practices [and] commercial technology, but taken that extra mile,” Jason Brown, Applied Intuition’s general manager for defense, told Tectonic.
Autonomy shop: Let’s kick it off with Axion. The development cloud—that’s what the company calls it—is a build-out of Applied Intuition’s bread-and-butter software that tests autonomous vehicles. Think of it as a massive, constantly updated toolkit that gives companies and militaries the ability to build and test their own autonomy software.
Axion:
- Connects operators and developers quickly, leading to systems that work better on the ground, and can be updated quickly to meet changing battlefield needs.
- Allows developers to test their software against thousands of theoretical sticky situations—like, say, comms loss—and also benchmark it against the goals for what the software ultimately needs to do.
- Enables users to test their software in hyper-realistic virtual scenarios, creating a “digital twin” of whatever autonomous system you’re working on which is a whole hell of a lot cheaper to break than the real thing.
- Involves masses of real-time data and feedback. Brown called it “machine learning ops on steroids.”
Applied Intuition won a $171.1M contract with the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) back in January to help the DoD build and test its autonomous platforms. Axion is the software that will enable them to do that.
Ready to rumble: Now, let’s say you didn’t want to develop your own autonomy software, and just wanted to plug and play. Well, Applied Intution’s got a solution for that too. Acuity, the other product line, is a full-blown autonomy suite—built using Axion on top of EpiSci’s autonomy software—that can get humans out of the loop (or at least less involved) real quick.
- The company says the software gives its users and their platforms “an unfair advantage,” which tbh we thought was clever.
- It can be deployed on pretty much all hardware—anything from Humvees to warships.
- According to Brown, Acuity can also be adjusted to provide degrees of autonomy—everything from something like driver assistance up to full-blown drone status.
Brown said that about three-fourths of Acuity was built using EpiSci’s software, plus new bells and whistles added using Axion. He said “at least three of the major armed services” are using some form of Acuity, and that it’s been tried on everything from a modified F16 to ships at sea.
“We’re making vehicles that were not designed to be autonomous, autonomous,” he said, “We’ve done that in the air. We’ve done that on the water. We’ve done that on the ground.”
He also said the software can easily integrate with other C2 systems, like Anduril’s Lattice.
Speedy quick: The goal here, Brown said, is to make it way, way faster to build and field autonomous systems for everyone from start-ups to the primes. The commercial world is already doing it, he said, so it’s time for defense to follow suit.
“There’s an inevitability to defense following the same path around software-defined vehicles,” he said, “There are various different unique aspects of the use cases, but the core of it is really about 90% the same.”