Pictured is a Northrop Grumman photo of the Talon IQ drone during a mission autonomy flight over Mojave, Calif.
A “Talon IQ” Model 437 aircraft by Northrop Grumman‘s Scaled Composites has flown a mission autonomy test flight using the company’s Prism software and Hivemind software by Shield AI, the companies said on Thursday.
“During the flight, Shield AI’s Hivemind software successfully commanded the aircraft, executing combat air patrol and target engagement maneuvers,” according to the companies. “Talon IQ then seamlessly swapped back to Northrop Grumman’s own Prism autonomy software.”
Aircraft designer and entrepreneur Burt Rutan founded Scaled Composites in Mojave, Calif., in 1982.
The recent test flight “demonstrated how Talon IQ’s plug‑and‑play design can host third‑party AI platforms and meet U.S. Government Reference Architectures (GRAs), the standards that ensure defense technology components interoperate securely and reliably,” according to Northrop Grumman and Shield AI. “Hivemind took to the sky after a single‑day hardware‑in‑the‑loop test, proving an AI [artificial intelligence] package can move from lab to real‑world flight rapidly with Talon IQ and its GRA-compliant ecosystem.”
The test flight comes, as the Air Force begins the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) mission autonomy phase in which RTX‘s Collins Aerospace and Shield AI are providing software for the General Atomics YFQ-42A CCA prototype and the Anduril Industries YFQ-44A CCA prototype, respectively, under the service’s Autonomy Government Reference Architecture approach to adapt new, vendor agnostic software easily into major weapons systems.
This year, the Air Force is to choose the YFQ-42A or the YFQ-44A for CCA Increment 1.
The Northrop Grumman YFQ-48A Talon is the third CCA prototype to gain an Air Force designation and may compete for CCA Increment 2–the development of which is to start this year.
A version of this story originally appeared in affiliate publication Defense Daily.