Phase II Amount
$1,249,997
Since the Cold War ended, the Air Force has significantly reduced its global footprint. From 93 air bases during World War II, the Air Force presently maintains 33 permanent overseas air bases, a 65% reduction. This reduction challenges the Air Forces ability to project power while simultaneously concentrating friendly high value assets for potential adversary action (AFDN 1-21 ACE). This reduction in fixed site basing requires the Air Force to rely heavily on its main operating bases to project power, support US allied forces in varying regions, and respond quickly to global threats. Operating 24/7, these bases are under constant threat of both insider and outside threats as well as the threat of simple maintenance issues that could prevent a fully operational status. Currently both Defenders and Air Field Maintainers spend countless hours manually patrolling the installation and airfields to identify threats and maintenance issues on the runway/installation. These daily, manpower intensive operations, increase the chance for human error and take vital time away from daily and deployed activities. Reducing the need for time consuming tasks such as patrolling wooded areas of the installation where there is typically no human interaction or spending hours driving the airfield trying to identify broken or inoperable lights will enable the reallocation of human resources to focus on more vital tasks around the installation increasing force protection and airfield resiliency. The utilization of unmanned systems paired with AI/ML automation, enables the Airmen to rapidly detect and track inbound threats, act as a force multiplier through human-machine teaming, ultimately reducing risk to force and the time it takes to identify both threats and maintenance issues on the airfield. ZeroEyes Integrated Aerial Inferencing (ZIAI), powered by the commercial DeepZero platform, integrates to existing stationary and aerial surveillance systems and enables the Air Force to use AI/ML to autonomously identify threats like weapons, active shooters, intruders, unauthorized vehicles, adversaries using cell phones, cameras, and drones. To expand on these capabilities, ZeroEyes will develop an algorithm capable of identifying airfield lighting that has become inoperable through visual inspection reducing the amount of time an Airmen spends time manually inspecting runway lights and the time a runway could be down for maintenance. The proposed COTS solution adaptation - ZeroEyes Integrated Aerial Inferencing (ZIAI) enables defenders & Airfield Maintenance personnel to proactively identify threats, vector Security Forces and other first responders to the location in real-time, and maintain persistent deterrence and situational awareness over the threat. Utilizing any COTS UAS, ZeroEyes can integrate intrusion, object, and weapons detection analytics onboard the UAS or through a distributed processing network enabling near real-time threat detection.
