The Defense Innovation Unit announced the results of its initiative to utilize commercial artificial intelligence to enhance maritime domain awareness.
DIU said Wednesday that the three vendors awarded prototype agreements in January—Ditto, Syntiant and HarperDB—managed to meet the goals of Project Common Operational Database, or Project COD.
The project, launched by the DIU in partnership with the U.S. Navy’s Project Overmatch and the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, Pacific, aims to create a database that enables unmanned systems to function efficiently in disconnected, denied, intermittent and/or limited bandwidth, or DDIL, environments.
Project COD is intended to address technical challenges with edge computing that prevent the sharing of sensor data within forward deployed devices, which is necessary to achieve mission autonomy.
The initiative aligns with the Navy’s mission to ensure freedom of navigation and access to global waterways. With the lack of crewed assets in vital maritime areas, the vendors’ success in developing unmanned systems and autonomous platforms will potentially boost maritime domain awareness.
The three participating companies demonstrated their proof of concept through test and evaluation exercises such as Mission Autonomy Proving Grounds and the final event at Task Force 59.
Mike Tall, senior science and technology manager of Project Overmatch, noted the project’s positive results in enabling scalable mission autonomy during the tests. He said, “[It] will continue to be used and improved for the realization of the hybrid fleet.”
Lieutenant Commander Al Williams, DIU program manager, said, “The combination of these capabilities will significantly improve maritime domain awareness/command & control in critical maritime DDIL environments as a key force enabler.”
