Building upon a century of evolution in autonomy
“A new vision for how our Armed Forces should be conceived,” was defined in the recently published Strategic Defence Review (SDR), stating that it would feature “a combination of conventional and digital warfighters; the power of drones, AI and autonomy complementing the ‘heavy metal’ of tanks and artillery.” Furthermore, the new type of warfare will see “armed forces increasingly using uncrewed and autonomous capabilities to generate mass and lethality.”
Autonomy, however, has been a core element of the battlefield for more than a century, starting with platform autonomy when remotely piloted biplanes and automated targeting systems were introduced during The Great War. In the late 20th century, we saw the evolution of mission autonomy – whereby a platform could fly itself and be tasked with a mission by a machine, following way points, taking avoiding action and monitoring fuel levels. Both phases involved human interactions and were dependant on the fragility and availability of people and assets being in the right place at the right time.
Now we stand on the cusp of agentic autonomy, in which an artificial intelligence (AI) system can make independent cognitive decisions and take actions to achieve specific objectives, without human intervention.
Small, low-cost drones are now commonplace on the battlefield. Despite their lower range and payload capacity, they can still deliver a significant force-multiplier, which can be increased further through the use of autonomy. In combination with distributed sensing, autonomy enables the creation of an asymmetric threat using cheap platforms to incapacitate expensive platforms and senses the battlefield in new and innovative ways.
As system integrators, Leonardo is helping to develop such autonomy and exploiting sensors to create new capability fit for the modern, and next-generation, battlefield. We’ve already done several trials over the past couple of years, but an upcoming flight trial will be the first of its type using a UK sovereign ecosystem of SMEs working in partnership with Leonardo to deliver a new and novel capability, helping to grow the sovereign supplier base and quality UK jobs.
The trial will deliver genuinely autonomous platforms performing missions and making independent decisions and tackling emerging problems. This is not innovation theatre, but a genuine UK sovereign capability being tested with a clear route to a commercial product.
Driving economic growth
This collaborative approach is central to Leonardo’s defence and security activities. It is therefore encouraging to see the SDR stating that “there is a deep range of partners outside Defence that it must work to bring in alongside its prime contractors, from technology and innovation startups and scale-ups to SMEs.”
The defence industry is a spectrum, and we know that developing certain technology requires a variety of specialist skills and expertise, many of which are provided by small, medium and micro companies. We also recognise that unlike Leonardo, most SMEs are not systems integrators and do not have the capacity to profitably manage large, complex, long-term projects.
Rather than adopting the traditional approach of giving smaller companies a contract to deliver something – be it research, hardware or software – we have created a partnering programme which aims to address the inherent challenges – around assurance, business sustainability and resilience, and long-term growth – faced by some SMEs, and in particular small and micro companies.
Leonardo has identified a key set of technologies in which we want to strengthen our offerings, such as advanced AI, machine learning, advanced manufacturing and a few other areas. We’ve then scanned the UK looking for the best of the best, pinpointing a small number of excellent companies and partnering with them to provide them with longevity by guaranteeing a fixed period of investment and income. The aim of partnering is to always achieve clear, mutual commercial benefit, where both Leonardo and our SME partners can generate revenue from opportunities that we could not do individually.
We ask these specialists to focus on advancing the product or capability as far as possible. By doing so, Leonardo gets a long-term partner with whom we can undertake product development, and research and development, while our partner has the assurance of guaranteed income over a multi-year period. Moreover, the partner generates their own intellectual property (IP), increases its value and sustainably grows its workforce.
Cultivating academic relationships
Supplementing our industrial partnerships, Leonardo is forming strategic relationships with several universities, looking at everything from AI (neural networks, reinforcement learning, adversarial AI, and autonomous tasking and collaboration) to photonics research, cyber security, flight dynamics, and a host of space technologies.
By investing in academic departments and helping grow skills, we can ensure that academia is well-positioned to support the hardest questions in defence and security, not just today, but in the future by developing the early career researchers to create a sustainable academic sector. We partner closely with our academic teams to ensure that the work we do is always within their ethical research policies, following the UK’s responsible research frameworks.
Our commitment to academia is further strengthened by Leonardo being a strategic partner to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), into which we are one of the top collaborative funders. This partnership enables us to influence the direction of future research that addresses the UK’s defence, security and resilience challenges. Industry must work alongside Government to ensure that investment in our universities can generate value either through direct supply chain involvement or through supporting entrepreneurial activity.
These partnerships have already driven trials, with Leonardo working alongside our academic partnerships to demonstrate unique radar systems, and we have several joint EPSRC and Leonardo-funded ‘prosperity partnerships’ – all aimed at jointly moving academic research out of the lab and into a commercial environment.
Exploiting military-focused IP for civil applications
We are also proud to have formed a partnership with Ploughshare, the facility wholly owned by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) which aims to transform ideas into commercial opportunities through having exclusive rights to a unique portfolio of MOD-developed and Crown-owned IP.
While Leonardo has been developing IP in the military sphere for decades, it often doesn’t reach the civil arena. IP that we created 10 or 20 years ago may no longer be relevant for the battlefield, but could be highly relevant for the civil market. Through our work with Ploughshare, we are looking to exploit what we call ‘fallow IP’ across different industries such as automotive and pharmaceutical.
Under the terms of DEFCON 705, the MOD retains sovereign IP but allows partners such as Leonardo to undertake research. Ploughshare partners then receive a royalty-free licence to exploit the IP, while the MOD generates significant IP-based income for the UK economy from research that otherwise might be left on the shelf gathering dust.
It’s about strengthening the UK sovereign industrial base through better exploiting existing IP and accelerating the translation of under-leveraged IP into defence and civil markets.
A history of partnerships
Throughout our company’s history, we have successfully partnered on major programmes, with Typhoon and Global Combat Air Programme being the obvious current examples.
Recognising the value that such collaborations bring, we will continue working with industry, government and academia, and investing time, effort and resources to deliver exceptional technology solutions, support academic excellence and stimulate economic growth for the UK.