General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) successfully completed a groundbreaking test involving multiple aircraft and advanced software, including a simulated autonomous shoot-down. During the exercise, GA-ASI’s MQ-20 Avenger® unmanned jet, equipped with the latest government reference autonomy software, operated alongside both live and virtual aircraft, with additional support from Shield AI’s software.
As software-defined mission systems rapidly advance, ensuring that aircraft hardware remains compatible with diverse software sources is critical. GA-ASI’s flights have proven that adhering to “government reference architectures” allows seamless hardware-software interoperability.
In the recent exercise, the MQ-20 demonstrated key autonomous capabilities: midair station-keeping with live aircraft, patrolling a simulated combat zone, teaming with human operators, and autonomously intercepting and simulating missile strikes against two live targets. The event, using live Group 5 UAVs, highlighted the maturity of autonomous technology for future aerial platforms.
A key part of the test was a successful in-flight transition from government software to Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy suite, which executed similar mission tasks without disrupting aircraft performance. This seamless software handoff validates the power of standardized architectures to enable flexible, vendor-independent system integration.
The demonstration supports the development of an autonomy “app store” model, giving the government access to a wide range of capabilities from different vendors, fostering modular, scalable, and rapidly deployable autonomy solutions.
