The HIS consortium (consisting of Helsing and Rohde & Schwarz subsidiary Schönhofer Sales and Engineering (SSE)) has reached a critical milestone with the first release of the cross-sectional artificial intelligence (AI) development platform for the Franco-German Future Combat Air System (FCAS) programme, otherwise known as the AI-backbone, Rohde & Schwarz announced on 27 May 2024.
The company added that the release had occurred just nine months after the contract to provide it was initiated.
In the German initiative focused on the FCAS programme’s Next Generation Weapon System (NGWS), the AI-backbone is already being used by over 50 pilot users from a total of 10 organizations for the development of future-oriented technologies.
The AI-Backbone is the first software platform that enables collaborative AI workflows across organisations in the military sector, Rohde & Schwarz claimed in its press release. As a customer-side solution, the platform ensures standardised procedures and open, interoperable architectures.
“In doing so, it overcomes the status quo, which consists of highly manual and fragmented processes with numerous interfaces,” Rohde & Schwarz explained. “The AI-backbone now creates a standardised path to military AI through a centralised platform that ensures the data security and sovereignty of every user. Additionally, the software development kit’s open architecture and transparent deployment provide seamless integration that increases flexibility and efficiency across the workflow.
“The use of AI will be critical to FCAS air superiority. AI accelerates the evaluation of sensor data, the planning of missions and the use of effectors,” explained Frank Schrudde, managing director of SSE. “As an innovative, long-standing partner of the Bundeswehr, we bring vigour to the research landscape. We are proud to have brought the agility of a medium-sized company to the project in collaboration with our partners. We were able to deploy the first demonstrator in an extremely short time of nine months.”
“With the first release, an important milestone in the implementation of the AI-backbone has been reached,” added Stephanie Lingemann, programme director and head of the air domain at Helsing. “We are proud to have advanced the AI-backbone from the initial idea to implementation. The development of AI is now being supported in the ongoing phase of the national R&T [research and technology] projects and a decisive cross-sectional contribution is being made to enabling the NGWS.”
The next stage of development will be reached with the second release, expected in November 2024, enabling standardised, collaborative AI workflows in highly sensitive environments while adding additional capability components.
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