An AI agent Flew a USAF Training Aircraft For Over 17 hours

Today, I am going to share a very interesting piece of information that an artificial intelligence agent has recently flown the USAF training aircraft for over 17 hours. For the very first time, the Lockheed Martin VISTA X-62A training aircraft was flown for such a long time duration. VISTA is actually the acronym for Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft. It has the capability to use the software in order to simulate the performance characteristics of other aircraft. On this particular occasion, it actually mimicked a human pilot.

It’s The First Time AI Has Flown A Tactical USAF Training Aircraft

The reports claim that the flight took place during a testing period back in December. The point worth mentioning here is that it is the first time that AI has been engaged in such a way on a tactical aircraft.  Lockheed further said that the purpose is to use the platform in order to test aircraft designs that can be flown autonomously.

USAF TPS director of research Dr. M. Christopher Cotting stated:

“VISTA will allow us to parallelize the development and test of cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques with new uncrewed vehicle designs. This approach, combined with focused testing on new vehicle systems as they are produced, will rapidly mature autonomy for uncrewed platforms and allow us to deliver tactically relevant capability to our warfighter.”

Let me tell you that Martin Lockheed’s skunkworks division worked with Calspan in order to build VISTA for the USAF TPS at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The point notable here is that the VISTA program has been made to develop the virtual heads-up display and voice command input system for the highly anticipated F-35 Lightning II.

Reports claim that USAF upgraded the VISTA X-62A with Lockheed’s Model Following Algorithm (MFA) and System for Autonomous Control of the Simulation (SACS) recently. The good part is that these systems help VISTA carry out advanced flight tests when integrated. It helps harness autonomy and AI.

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