US Navy foresees an uncrewed future for its surface and underwater fleet
The service has been conducting various procurement and development efforts to integrate unmanned surface and underwater vehicles into its inventory.
2019 AlphaPilot teams announced
Lockheed Martin and Drone Racing League (DRL) have announced the nine teams that have been accepted into the 2019 AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge.
The teams have earned a spot in DRL's inaugural autonomous UAS racing series, the Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing (AIRR) Circuit, which kicks off later in 2019.
The nine AlphaPilot teams are ICARUS from Atlanta, Georgia; Formula Drone from Los Angeles, California; KEF Robotics from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; MAVLab from Delft, the Netherlands; TEAM USRG @ KAIST from Daejeon, South Korea; Team Puffin with four team members from the US, Sweden and Australia; UZH Robotics and Perception Group from Zurich, Switzerland; Warsaw MIMotaurs from Warsaw, Poland, and XQuad from Minas Gerais, Brazil.
The teams will compete to design an AI framework capable of piloting racing UAS through high-speed aerial courses without any GPS, data relay or human intervention. AlphaPilot teams will battle it out during AIRR's inaugural, four-event season later in 2019 for a chance at winning a $1 million cash prize, sponsored by Lockheed Martin.
An additional $250,000 reward will be given to the first team whose autonomous UAS pushes the limits of performance between human and machine, and bests a human-piloted UAS.
The AlphaPilot Challenge launched in November on the HeroX platform, attracting 424 teams from 81 countries. Teams competed in a series of qualification tests in spring 2019. A panel of industry experts evaluated their technical strategy and abilities in developing image-classification algorithms and performing in simulated racing environments.
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