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Missile system provider MBDA revealed ‘Ground Warden’ at the Eurosatory in Paris. It is a new AI-powered decision-making aid that uses beyond-line-of-sight technology to find hidden targets, which works with MBDA’s other assets and is designed to support military units within their ISR operations.
Some of the company’s popular products include the Akeron MP man-portable anti-tank guided missile system, and the Land & Naval Combat Missile System with Beyond Line-of-Sight capability. The new Ground Warden system works with these effectors and leverages AI to empower military units.
According to Interesting Engineering, the company presented the reporters at the event with a scenario: a drone operating in an area populated by trees, an environment that is ideal for tanks to hide and make their attacks, and so even man-portable systems can find it difficult to counter such an attack. MBDA suggests pairing up the missile system with its Ground Warden system, which can analyze data from the drone in real time and suggest attack options to the user about the location of the target and when it can be intercepted.
Another scenario provided showed a missile fired toward a target captured images on its flight path and beamed them back to the ground module, where they were analyzed to identify other threats in the area, showing that even a fired weapon can be purposed as a sensor and used to improve the effectiveness of the units.
Modern warfare is changing at an incredible speed, and MBDA is clearly ensuring that its systems are being upgraded accordingly, using AI to empower its system as a whole and provide a more detailed analysis of the data it receives.
The system is designed to incorporate user requirements and feedback while also capturing enhancement requests, which are all fed into the software development process to offer new, user-friendly features in the next updates, as promised by the company. However, they emphasize that even with all the technology used the operator is always in the loop – The system is only designed to provide decision aids and not actually make them, the final decision always falls to the human operating the device.
