The US Air Force is demonstrating the ability of its Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) to work with varied collaborative combat aircraft (CCA).
A-GRA has been implemented by the USAF’s autonomy vendors, RTX Collins and Shield AI, into the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) YFQ-42A and the Anduril YFQ-44A, says the USAF.
According to the USAF, A-GRA allows mission software to be decoupled from specific aircraft. This helps with integration and promotes innovation.
“Verifying A-GRA across multiple partners is critical to our acquisition strategy,” says USAF colonel Timothy Helfrich, portfolio acquisition executive for Fighters and Advanced Aircraft.
“It proves that we are not locked into a single solution or a single vendor. We are instead building a competitive ecosystem where the best algorithms can be deployed rapidly to the warfighter on any A-GRA compliant platform, regardless of the vendor providing the algorithm.”
The USAF explains that A-GRA takes an “open system approach” that sets up a universal standard for autonomy and allows software and algorithms from a range of vendors to be quickly adopted. This allows tactics and capabilities to be introduced rapidly compared with threats.
The YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A, both of which are uncrewed, are competing in the USAF’s CCA Increment 1 effort, which will see 100-150 CCAs obtained by the end of the decade.
In a related statement, GA-ASI said that it had successfully integrated third party mission autonomy into the YFQ-42A, and that the aircraft had completed its first semi-autonomous mission.
The work saw Collins’s Sidekick Collaborative Mission Autonomy Software integrated with the aircraft using A-GRA.
“The integration enabled robust and reliable data exchange between the autonomy software and the aircraft’s mission systems, ensuring precise execution of mission autonomy commands,” says GA-ASI.
In the test, autonomy mode was activated from a ground station, with a human autonomy operator transmitting commands to the YFQ-42A, which was able to execute them accurately for four hours.
