Coalition launched to create AI aerospace systems

Sandia National Laboratories recently launched Autonomy New Mexico, an academic research coalition tasked with creating artificially intelligent aerospace systems.

The coalition held its first meeting last week at the University of New Mexico to propose new ideas and discuss shared goals.

Sandia is operated by the National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, a subsidiary of Honeywell International, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

For more than 30 years, Sandia has tested hypersonic weapons. These weapons are long-range missiles that fly a mile per second or faster, and tests take weeks of planning. Sandia researchers believe artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy could deduce the planning time to minutes for deployed systems.

AI has the capability of developing a flight plan in minutes and self-correcting in milliseconds.

“The research objectives of AutonomyNM are similar to those being studied for self-driving cars and other autonomous system technologies, and we’re building off that groundwork,” Alex Roesler, a senior manager at Sandia, who leads the coalition, said. “Unfortunately, you can’t put an algorithm developed for a car into a high-speed aircraft, so we’re working with our partners to create new technologies for a new application.”

Sandia plans to finish the foundational technologies of AI flight systems by 2024.