Southern California-based software development firm EpiSci had a significant year. In May, the company participated in an effort that put Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall in the cockpit of an AI-piloted F-16 for a capabilities demonstration.
Recently, EpiSci took part in Silent Swarm 2024, where it moved its AI pilot from the air to the captain’s seat on the water at the Alpena Combat Readiness Center in Michigan.
The annual exercise featured around 60 technologies and more than 500 participants. EpiSci tested the capabilities of its technology in a contested environment, essentially pitting offense against defense in a maritime battlespace.
Josh Bloom, one of EpiSci’s senior software engineers, said it was a big opportunity for the company’s expanding efforts to meet the Department of Defense’s need for autonomous vehicles.
“Having the ability to really scale up to six boats at Silent Swarm, we’ve since scaled up to 10 boats in testing, and they’ve done this in a matter of six months,” Bloom said. “They’ve gone from no boats to being able to manufacture 15 right now. Just getting out on the water and actually testing in these realistic environments is something that really hasn’t been done before this.”
The exercise highlighted the abilities of the team’s cross-domain collaborative autonomy technology. EpiSci can take the AI out of a jet and run it on six HAVOC-AI Rampage USVs. Therefore, it can use a single command and control operator to carry out a mission.
“That’s really what the algorithms have been developed for,” Bloom said. “They’re built in such a way that a C2 operator only has to interface with one of these boats to interface with the entire swarm. We have message passing that will take a single operator command and distribute it to the rest of the swarm.”
EpiSci’s founder, president and CEO, Bo Ryu, said working on the water, rather than in the air, provided a very practical means to grow their efforts.
“Maritime is actually accelerating a lot faster, obviously, because aircraft are very hard to modify and add something new without certification,” Ryu said. “Experimentally, we are doing really well, but we’ll see how fast it comes down. But in the water, it’s a very different ball game when it comes to speed and scale.”
As the Department of Defense continues to reshape its forces for potential conflicts with near-peer adversaries, speed and scale remains at the top of the list when it comes to to bolstering America’s defense efforts. EpiSci sees the plug-and-play functionality as a driver in getting its technology into the hands of the people who needed it.
“They cannot deal with 10 different autonomy solutions; it’s just a nightmare,” Ryu said. “The government has a very clear goal: can they find a vendor with a technology solution that can rapidly adapt to a new platform without waiting for six months? Can we do it in two weeks? Four weeks? One week? When they change it, that’s really what our team started demonstrating.”
While integration with multiple platforms remains an overarching goal of EpiSci, Ryu acknowledges there is another learning curve that needs to happen to truly bring this technology to the fight: the human aspect.
Ryu said military leadership should not think of using autonomous vehicles the same way they would with an experienced warfighter in the driver’s seat. Rather, Ryu said, it would take a recalibration of risk assessment to meet specific objectives, as threats could now be addressed in ways they never could with lives at stake.
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Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article and video stated that Merlin acquired EpiSci in June. While the parties reached an agreement in June, the acquisition was not finalized. Straight Arrow News deeply regrets the error.
