WASHINGTON — American shipbuilder HII and defense tech firm Shield AI have agreed to partner to advance one another’s autonomy command and control solutions for aerial, surface and subsurface drones, the companies announced today at DSEI in London.
The new partnership focuses on HII’s Odyssey software suite and Shield AI’s Hivemind mission autonomy software. While HII has historically focused on maritime unmanned systems, Shield AI has primarily targeted aerial unmanned systems. The aim is for the companies to use each other’s expertise to improve their respective software’s ability to operate across domains.
This is “a unique best-in-breed technical collaboration to enable cross-domain autonomy for unmanned aerial systems, unmanned surface vehicles and unmanned undersea vehicles,” Eric Chewning, an HII executive, told Breaking Defense ahead of the Wednesday announcement. “Most importantly, as US and allied navies are looking to integrate manned and unmanned capability into a hybrid force structure, this type of industry teaming creates the interoperable ecosystem that can help accelerate this integration into the benefit of the warfighter.”
HII, primarily known for its high-profile aircraft carriers, destroyers and amphibs, has in recent years pursued other sectors of the defense tech industry, such as unmanned systems and the software needed to autonomously command and control them.
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Shield AI, a California-based aerospace and defense tech firm, was founded in 2015 and has two business units: one focused on hardware — for example, the V-BAT unmanned aerial system — and another focused on software, primarily Hivemind.
“Hivemind itself is focused on autonomy, and that’s autonomy more broadly, and applicable from air to maritime to ground to space and beyond, but we have historically just focused primarily on air, and are now expanding to maritime,” Nathan Michael, Shield AI’s chief technology officer, said in the same interview.
The partnership comes at a key moment for both companies. It follows HII’s announcement earlier this week that it was unveiling a new family of unmanned surface vessels to complement its UUV product line as well as its autonomy software.
For Shield AI, the announcement in London comes amid a broader push to claim greater market share on the global stage.
“I think what you’ll continue to see is, we’ve had tremendous demand globally. And so, growing up as an international business, as an example, not being focused or dependent upon just the US market. So I think there’s a very big international component,” the company’s new CEO Gary Steele told Breaking Defense at the Paris Air Show earlier this year.