Artist's concept: AIR is developing dominant tactical autonomy for multi-ship, beyond visual range air combat missions; the technology advances the capability for manned and unmanned combat aerial vehicles to work together.
Source: DARPA | George Wertz
How to develop dominant, AI-driven tactical autonomy
The Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements (AIR) program is developing dominant, AI-driven tactical autonomy for multi-ship, beyond visual range (BVR) air combat missions. Autonomy solutions will initially be developed and demonstrated on manned F-16 testbeds and then transferred to an unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV).
Many of the outstanding challenges to the development and deployment of tactical autonomy are related to operations in the real world.
AIR is focused on previously avoided research dimensions that must be addressed to enable tactical autonomy in operationally relevant combat: fully integrated sensors, scalability to larger engagements, adaptability to changing conditions in open-world problems, and the ability to learn predictive models that incorporate uncertain knowledge of the adversary and self, as well as deceptive effects.
AIR pairs existing, maturing, and emerging algorithmic approaches with expert human feedback to rapidly evolve cooperative, autonomous behaviors that address previously avoided challenges.
Fundamentally, AIR is addressing two technical areas:
Creating fast and accurate models that capture uncertainty and automatically improve with more data Developing AI-driven algorithmic approaches that enable real-time, distributed autonomous tactical execution within uncertain, dynamic, and complex operational environments.
The AIR program is also developing the hardware, computational processing, and software frameworks needed to rapidly design, test, and implement future iterations of advanced autonomous capabilities.
AIR builds on the within-visual-range (WVR) autonomous approaches pioneered under the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, moving to the BVR domain and demonstrating capabilities on uncrewed aircraft. AIR is developing advanced modeling and simulation approaches and dominant AI agents for live BVR missions.
https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/artificial-intelligence-reinforcements?utm_source=dvids&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=air
| Date Taken: | 06.01.2026 |
| Date Posted: | 06.29.2026 10:40 |
| Photo ID: | 9780072 |
| VIRIN: | 260601-D-QD798-4688 |
| Resolution: | 3840x2044 |
| Size: | 1.48 MB |
| Location: | ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, US |
| Web Views: | 86 |
| Downloads: | 12 |
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