After having successfully used “digital twinning” to design and prototype its latest jet trainer aircraft, the US Air Force is planning to use technology in developing and testing weapons, as reported by the Airforce magazine. They are building an online Colosseum in which vendor’s systems can virtually fight each other.
Col. Garry A. Haase, Head of the Munitions Directorate at the Air Force Research Lab, said AFRL plans to stage regular competition events in the Colosseum, each dealing with a different technology area.
While explaining the entire process to the vendors, he said that they will have to build the weapons following the Government Reference Architecture, in order to operate their digital twins in the Colosseum. He added that, “It’s not us owning all your intellectual property or the technologies necessarily, but it’s owning how we interface with those systems.”
The article reads that the AFRL’s Golden Horde program intends to introduce online Colosseum for developing, networked, collaborative, autonomous (NCA) system like “fire and forget” weapons, which will be capable of finding their own targets and attack them in a synchronized fashion.
Hasse informed that the first weapon has already been developed. Gray Wolf was digitally designed “from the beginning,” Hasse said. “We have a digital twin model of our Gray Wolf, which is what we have been playing in a lot of our scenarios.”
