UK holds beach landing exercise to train and develop AI technologies

Dstl alongside the Royal Navy and British Army conducted a beach landing exercise with a multitude of vessels including the Madfox unmanned surface vessel, to shape AI development. (Crown Copyright)

The UK held a large beach landing exercise in Hampshire to shape the development of artificial intelligence (AI) for the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the authority announced on 31 October.

Held over five days, the maritime exercise involved 130 personnel, 13 vessels, multiple unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), a light aircraft, and more than 50 cameras and sensors generating data to train AI algorithms and shape the development of new ethical AI technologies.

An MoD spokesperson informed Janes the exercise took place from 18 to 22 September and will help to “develop sensors and systems involved in object recognition and identification”.

During the landings, personnel were boarding and exiting the vehicles in a variety of ways to generate data representative of different behavioural traits. In one scenario, personnel acted as a co-ordinated military unit while in another, participants departed in a deliberately chaotic way to provide a wider data sample of human movement.

The exercise was led by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and supported by the Royal Navy and British Army alongside industry partners Thales, Leonardo, Frazer-Nash Consultancy, Faculty.ai, Lockheed Martin, Chess Dynamics, MSI, Overview, Vizgard, Living Optics, Sesanti, and BAE Systems. International partners included the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Munitions Directorate, the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Armaments Center (DEVCOM AC) supported by Opto-Knowledge Systems Inc (OKSI).