Delivering Hivemind: A software ecosystem to enable autonomy on the edge
Alex Burtness is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins University, where he studied systems engineering and mechanical engineering, respectively. He served in the Navy as an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) officer and worked at Brain Corp as a technical program manager before joining the Shield AI team in 2021. When people […]
2022 Letter from the CEO
Team, Security and stability have been the foundation of progress throughout history. In the eight decades following WWII, our families have enjoyed a period marked by relative peace and stability where peoples around the world competed and collaborated to create and trade goods, services, and ideas – to produce radical advancements in human achievement, human […]
Engineering Innovations with Lifesaving Implications
Jazz is an applied physicist and technical director at Shield AI. She led a V-BAT engineering team that successfully developed a belly bay payload capability and a custom cooling solution for Naval Advanced Medical Development’s (NAMD) & Defense Innovation Unit’s Just-In-Time Delivery Program. No one said integrating a highly capable expanded belly bay payload onto […]
Accelerating the Operational Deployment of the World’s Best AI Pilot to F-16, F-22, F-35 and Beyond
Craig “Bluto” Baker is a 30-year U.S. Air Force veteran, who recently retired as a Brigadier General. He is a command pilot with multiple combat tours and has directed operational updates, training, and requirements for F-35, F-22, and F-16 aircraft. In his role at Shield AI, Bluto will lead the company’s U.S. Air Force strategic […]
Hivemind for Operational, Read-and-React Swarming
As part of Shield AI’s work on an AFWERX Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) contract, we’ve integrated our autonomy and artificial intelligence stack, Hivemind, onto our vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aircraft, V-BAT, in simulation. The goal of this project is to operationalize Hivemind for different hardware platforms to support Air Force Special Operations Command […]
A 30-year Adventure: From Working on F/A-18 Avionics to Managing a Global V-BAT Fleet
At Shield AI, we love a good story. Whether it’s a story about one of our teammates going above and beyond to delight a customer or colleague or a story about how our tech helped a warfighter in combat, we are always eager to hear and share it. We recently sat down with Renee Hubener, […]
AI for Maneuver: Air Dominance
“AI for Maneuver has the promise to break the paradigm by delivering both quality and quantity: capabilities that don’t just augment human performance, but also scale human performance.”
The Next Era of Aviation – Autonomy and AI Pilots
I will never forget my first conversation with our engineers at Shield AI, where I learned that in three weeks our AI Pilots accumulated the equivalent of 31 years of flight, and then they talked about increasing that ratio by orders of magnitude. People haven’t even begun to wrap their heads around the implications of […]
Why Shield AI? Bob Harward’s Perspective
My good friend, former Secretary of Defense and fellow professional warrior General Jim Mattis said, “America’s military has no pre-ordained right to victory on the battlefield.” The assumption that our military will always be dominant because of past successes is dangerous, and blatantly not true. China and Russia are developing increasingly impressive capabilities, and the U.S. and our allies lack credible deterrents […]
Tesla Shows Us The Risks When Dominant Incumbents Fail To Be Bold
China’s military is Netflix; the U.S. military is Blockbuster. China is Amazon; the U.S. is Barnes & Noble. China is Tesla; the U.S. is General Motors. People thought the automotive industry could not be disrupted and that Ford, GM and Toyota had preordained rights to be the leaders for the next thousand years. Automotive executives […]
