By Brett Davis, Editor-in-Chief
Shield AI (Booth 1501) recently announced plans to acquire Australia-based Sentient Vision Systems, adding a situational awareness capability that will augment the company’s Hivemind AI pilot and its vertical takeoff and landing MQ-35 V-Bat uncrewed system.
Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s cofounder and president, told Seapower the addition will mean the company’s systems can provide increased surveillance and monitoring capabilities that aren’t GPS or radar based and can be deployed far more inexpensively than piloted systems.
The companies have been working together on a wide-area motion imagery (WAMI) system called Sentient Observer, which Shield AI plans to fly this year, and Tseng said it made sense just to acquire the company.
“What is really exciting about wide-area motion imaging is basically the ability to passively search … incredibly large areas that normally would have been reserved for expensive radar systems,” Tseng said.
“The North Star problem for us is … how can we find, fix and put targets of interest at risk 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without GPS, without communications, without remote pilots, in high-threat environments over 30,000 to 50,000 square nautical mile areas and do so without breaking the bank?” he said.
Combining AI pilots, Sentient Observer and teams of affordable drones like the V-Bat will provide the same land and maritime domain awareness that expensive Group 5 drones and crewed aircraft like the P-8 provide at a fraction of the price, he said.
“If you put a team of eight V-Bats up in the air with wide area motion imaging, if each one of them had it, all of a sudden to replicate that capability you would need something like 65 to 70 normal ISR assets to cover that same exact area they’re going to cover,” Tseng said.
They can also be used in conjunction with products from other companies.
“As we think about intelligent, affordable mass … we want to make this product, Sentient Observer, widely available to every single OEM out there,” Tseng said. “We can’t solve the deterrence problem by ourself, we need to work and enable other companies to help deter our adversaries.”
In a release, Ryan Tseng, Shield AI cofounder and CEO, said, “Considering the imperative of covering vast maritime areas, especially in the Pacific, joining forces with Sentient was a strategic choice given their expertise in optical radar solutions. The integration of WAMI on V-Bat will revolutionize our offering, enabling Group 3-sized aircraft to perform tasks that previously required larger, costlier aircraft, significantly enhancing our customers’ operational capabilities.”
In February, V-Bat received certification for Australian operations from Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Shortly thereafter, in partnership with Shield AI’s Australian partner, Toll Aviation, the companies launched the inaugural Australian V-Bat training course.
ViDAR is Sentient’s AI system, which uses an electro-optic/infrared sensor to detect and classify targets in the imagery stream that would be invisible to a human operator or to a conventional radar. Tseng said the company’s technology can identify objects using as little information as a single pixel.