The U.S. Army has marked the second year of Project Convergence and demonstrated 110 new technologies meant to support joint all-domain command and control as part of the experimentation effort, Defense One reported Wednesday.
Tech experimentation efforts that Army officials said worked during the project’s second year include artificial intelligence-enabled reconnaissance, high-bandwidth mesh networking using drones and a small satellite constellation in low-Earth orbit and rapid threat data sharing across services.
For AI-enabled reconnaissance, the military conducted a reconnaissance mission using four autonomous robots linked to two tethered drones.
“And so those robotic vehicles and their ability to collaborate and sense decided how to recon that area on their own,” said Col. Andre Abadie, head of the Project Convergence 21 operational planning team.
Abadie said those robots also decided how to report the detected threats to the communications component.
“We hope to take that next year and actually do that at night,” he added.
Project Convergence also allowed soldiers to test new equipment like the IVAS headset and helped Army officials to identify other areas that need improvement, such as equipping autonomous robots with new sensing capabilities and defending against adversaries’ electronic warfare capabilities.