MQ-9 Drone Integrated With Air Force Research Lab’s AI-capable Agile Condor Pod

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc.(GA-ASI), with the support of SRC Inc., successfully integrated and flew the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Agile Condor Pod on an MQ-9 Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) at GA-ASI’s Flight Test and Training Center in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

The Agile Condor Pod provides on-board high-speed computer processing coupled with machine learning algorithms to detect, correlate, identify, and track targets of interest. With this capability, the MQ-9 is able to identify objects autonomously utilizing its on-board Electro-optical/Infrared (EO/IR) sensor and GA-ASI’s Lynx Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR).

High-powered computing at the edge enables autonomous target detection, identification and nomination at extended ranges and on-board processing reduces communication bandwidth requirements to share target information with other platforms.