Army picks startup Rivet to construct AI-enabled soldier glasses

The way forward for soldier “super goggles,” designed to provide frontline troops an AI-enabled view of the battlefield and voice command over drone swarms, is unlikely to seem like the cumbersome, Star Wars-style face laptop which may come to thoughts. Instead, the brand new tech could look extra just like the glasses you may see on patrons in a Brooklyn espresso store, based on the corporate chosen to make them.

The Army has awarded a $200 million contract to a startup referred to as Rivet to develop prototype computer systems, goggles, and watches to provide troopers a battlefield intelligence edge, as a part of the Soldier Borne Mission Command program. A joint crew from tech giants Anduril and Meta may also design a prototype for consideration below the same contract, based on individuals aware of the matter.

Palmer Luckey, founding father of Anduril, hasn’t been shy about his hopes to turn into the provider of hands-free augmented actuality kits for troopers and, from there, construct out a complete human-machine “ecosystem” to attach operators to drones and AI aides. And because the creator of the Oculus virtual-reality recreation system, he has one thing of a bonus. A February weblog submit featured him with a lab prototype of the Anduril system that appears like one thing out of science fiction.

But Rivet’s providing seems to be very completely different. Dave Marra, Rivet’s founder, advised Defense One on Friday that his strategy boils all the way down to 4 phrases: “comfort, ruggedization, utility, and compliance.”

He sees his firm’s prototype as a jumping-off level to attach troopers with a wide selection of AI capabilities by easy voice or different instructions, in addition to to attach logistics professionals, maintainers, and others with AI-enabled instruments.

“These kinds of natural language interactions are the most critical element to enable,” Marra mentioned. “So you assume, ‘I have to control robots, and I have to do it without significant training and learning. I want to recognize nouns on the battlefield that could be a target: that could be a good guy, a bad guy, or another noun on the factory floor. I want to identify anomalies, more importantly, correlate in these data sets.’”

The end result is real-time predictive intelligence delivered directly to the eye—information about how the battlefield is changing and might change, or, in another context, which part might break next and what to do about it. Eyewear that sees probabilities in the future.

The project is part of the Army’s broader pursuit of soldier-borne smart systems, going back more than a decade, before even the Integrated Visual Augmentation System program, which essentially became SBMC. But prototypes from those efforts have faced a number of setbacks.

Now, Rivet has created what it calls an “integrated task system.” It features a small computer soldiers carry, as well as glasses capable of night vision, map display, and a wide array of applications. They look like something you could buy at the mall. That’s part of the point. They were engineered to be useful in conditions where earlier soldier vision displays failed. 

“If you’re wearing a pair of glasses on your face, they’ve got to conform to compliance measures for eye protection—not only from a ballistics perspective, but also adversarial lasers. You’re not going to be able to get that at Best Buy,” Marra said.

The system also runs on Android, to better allow operators to configure features to suit their needs. That flexibility reflects the Pentagon’s new approach of pushing more command and purchasing authority down to individual units—the people actually using the equipment who need to adjust it for rapidly changing conditions.

Marra said the company is working directly with soldiers to understand those conditions, beyond scheduled touch points. 

“We’ve gone out and tested it at a high frequency with operational units at scale,” he said. “Over the next 18 months, we’re going to do exactly that. In fact, we’ve programmed every 45 or 90 days, we’re going to be out with a minimum of a squad’s worth of systems, a dozen systems, and we’re going to go do soldiering with the soldier. We’re going to hang out with them every minute of that 72-hour mission, or every minute of that training evolution, and take your feedback and put it into the next iterative loop of hardware and software development.”

By contrast, Anduril’s offering is bolstered by the Lattice platform, an AI-powered software system that combines thousands of data streams into a single 3D interface. Lattice—more than the headset—is core to Luckey’s vision of building out the “human-machine ecosystem.”

But Anduril is not alone in that space. Palantir has its own suite of battlefield data-integration products. Marra, who previously worked at Palantir, described that company as a “strategic partner.”