Airbus has announced a successful flight test of their Auto’Mate (autonomous in-flight refueling) demonstrator utilizing CoreAVI’s GPU accelerated AI software stack, including VkCore SC and ComputeCore. The Airbus Auto’Mate represents a significant industry milestone by demonstrating Autonomous Assets Air to Air Refuelling operations flying with three manned drones Airbus DT-25s, and two more digital twins, under the control of an A310 MRTT tanker using an advanced navigation suite, including AI-based detection and cooperative control technologies.
Designed from the ground up for safety certification, CoreAVI’s Safe AI software suite includes
ComputeCore as well as VkCore SC. VkCore SC is a Vulkan SC implementation enabling
low-level high-performance compute acceleration, and ComputeCore is CoreAVI’s AI/ML
acceleration library providing APIs for BLAS, FFT, and a neural network inference engine
implementing The Khronos Group’s NNEF format. The building block nature of CoreAVI’s tools
and libraries provide scalable performance and capabilities making it easily expandable to meet
a wide range of compute algorithms.
“This Auto’mate flight demonstration marks a major success milestone for the growing
partnership between CoreAVI and Airbus for paving the future of AI-based airborne product
developments and certifications. This is the first time that Airbus has ever executed an AI flight
test that’s using a fully certifiable stack for autonomous air-to-air refuelling based on controlling
and guiding multiple drones from the Multi Role Tanker Transport aircraft,” said Dan Joncas,
deputy CEO at CoreAVI. “The value of Safe AI to airborne platforms cannot be overstated as it
enhances safety, reliability, efficiency while reducing pilot workload, training costs, and
ensuring more effective operations, especially in situations with low visibility. We’re happy to
work with a future-focused technology leader like Airbus to ensure the best in AI technology is
available to all integrators of safety critical systems.”
“Bringing state-of-the-art GPU compute capabilities to our product portfolio will allow us to
evolve and create new capabilities that put us on the forefront of military aviation technology,”
said David Pérez Amenabar, air refueling software innovation manager at Airbus Defence &
Space. “This successful technology deployment paves the way for a future where parallelization
enables numerous new data intensive applications. AI technology will be quintessential in the
future of our industry and CoreAVI’s SafeAI stack has proven to be an exceptional enabler for
these integrations. This particular iteration demonstrates our commitment to the future mosaic warfare and unmanned/manned aircraft teaming; we are ready for Autonomous Operation and
committed to developing the most capable interoperable system of systems for air
dominance.”