The US Army is putting money on AI-equipped drones that can help protect Abrams tanks from hidden threats like land mines and enemy ambush drones before crews roll into danger zones.
Defense technology company Safe Pro Group announced this week that it has received a $2.5 million Army contract to integrate its Ground Truth threat-detection software, built on datasets from Ukraine, into Anduril Industries’ Ghost-X drone, a small, uncrewed aircraft resembling a helicopter.
Safe Pro said that its software can identify and map more than 150 types of explosive threats from aerial imagery.
Potential threats to armor include land mines, anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions, and first-person-view drones waiting to ambush troops, the company said. The aim is to give tank crews a clearer view of hazards in their path.
The new contract comes as the Army rethinks how its armored forces will operate on battlefields that are littered with traditional threats like mines but are also radically transformed by aerial drones, ground robots, and artificial intelligence.
On Ukrainian battlefields, tanks and other armored vehicles have faced dense minefields, drone reconnaissance, and increasingly capable FPV drones that can strike vehicles from above or pursue them through terrain once considered relatively protected.
Armored combat isn’t dead, but the rules have changed with the rise of new battlefield threats.
The Army is adapting its armored formations for combat environments that have made tanks far more vulnerable, environments where tanks have to approach cautiously, rather than charge forward. The Safe Pro contract focuses on finding threats before a crew encounters them.
Safe Pro said the Ghost-X drones will use artificial intelligence to detect and locate threats and feed that information into military networks, specifically ATAK and Anduril’s Lattice.
“By adding Safe Pro’s threat-detection technology onto Ghost-X, we’re providing soldiers with faster, more reliable situational awareness at the tactical edge — directly supporting the Army’s tank survivability and reconnaissance missions,” Daniel Leighton, General Manager of Tactical Effects at Anduril Industries, said in a release.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post The US Army is putting money on AI drones that can find hidden threats and protect its Abrams tanks appeared first on Business Insider.
