AI has evolved beyond our imagination and capacity as Lockheed Martin declares that their AI has piloted a military aircraft for 17 hours. Lockheed Martin’s VISTA X-62A training planeis the first combat aircraft to have been flown by AI. Engineers claim that software can be used by VISTA to replicate the performance characteristics of other aircraft, but this time it imitated a human pilot.
The platform will be used to test autonomous flight-capable aircraft designs and will enable the development and testing of cutting-edge artificial intelligence approaches with new uncrewed vehicle designs. For the USAF TPS at Edwards Air Force Base in California, VISTA was constructed by Lockheed’s skunkworks division in collaboration with Calspan. The F-35 Lightning II’s virtual heads-up display and voice command input system were developed using the VISTA program. Lockheed’s Model Following Algorithm (MFA) and System for Autonomous Control of the Simulation (SACS) were recently installed on the VISTA X-62A by the USAF (SACS). These devices assist VISTA in conducting sophisticated flight experiments that make use of autonomy and AI.
