Pitch Day Investment in Battlefield Air Operations Family of Systems Technologies

Special Tactics operators do not have enough time nor compute power at the tactical edge to manually analyze overhead imagery to make informed time-critical decisions. During Phase I, Slingshot accomplished a technical feasibility assessment with an end-to-end bench top experiment of our AI-enabled autonomous edge device, “Slingshot Edge” for real-time inferencing. For Phase II, we will build this minimal viable product and embed our trained and parsed algorithms onto a lightweight GPU onboard a sUAS. Slingshot’s ATAK plug-in modules will be designed keeping the warfighter in-the-loop to provide an optimized user experience. At the end of Phase 2, an end-to-end, “sensor-to-decision” flight demonstration will be accomplished in a representative environment. The analytics provided are fundamentally different than current single-stream edge analytics. Slingshot Edge will deliver an automated image processing, object detection, and interpretation system providing decision-quality information to the Special Tactics operators. In Phase II, we will conduct a fully integrated live demonstration in a representative environment, improve system reliability, and productize our system. Achieving these goals includes scientific and software development, pricing and go-to-market strategies developed for target markets. This effort will also focus on industry engagement opportunities including events and demonstrations to position Slingshot Edge for commercialization.