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AlphaDogFight Trials Held Virtually for Final Event

The third and final competition in DARPA’s (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) AlphaDogFight trials will take place virtually on August 18-20 instead of in person due to the ongoing pandemic.

Participating teams and audience members will watch online as artificial intelligence algorithms control simulated F-16 fighters in aerial combat, culminating in a match up on August 20 between the top AI and an Air Force pilot flying a virtual reality F-16 simulator.

Last year, 8 teams were selected to participate in the trial. This aims to demonstrate advanced AI algorithms capable of performing simulated combat manoeuvring, AKA dogfight. These trials were designed to energise and expand a base of AI developers for DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) programme. The programme seems to increase trust in combat autonomy by using human-machine collaborative dogfighting as its challenge problem.

The first event was held in November last year. A second event was held in January this year demonstrating the vast improvement made with the algorithms over a short period of time. The algorithms took adversaries created by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL).

Here are some team videos and highlight of both the first and second trial.

Each day on the final event, Trial 3 will have a different focus with activities broadcast throughout the day on ADT TV.

Day 1 – features each of the eight teams flying their algorithms against five APL-developed adversary AI algorithms

Day 2 – teams fly against each other in a round-robin tournament

Day 3 – the top 4 teams compete in a single-elimination tournament for the AlphaDogFight Trials Championship. The champion team then flies against an F-16 pilot to rest the AI’s abilities against a human.

The following 8 teams are participating:

  • Aurora Flight Sciences

  • EpiSys Science

  • Georgia Tech Research Institute

  • Heron Systems

  • Lockheed Martin

  • Perspecta Labs

  • PhysicsAI

  • SoarTech

Registration to watch the AlphaDogFight Trials is now open at https://events.jhuapl.edu/ADT3AUGUST2020. The registration site includes details on the daily schedule, team information, sample ADT TV channel content, videos, and more. Registration closes August 17.

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