In the middle of a climb Faced with the tide of low-cost armed adversary drones that threaten U.S. troops abroad, the U.S. military is doing everything it can to protect its forces from the ever-present threat of death from above. But between expensive munitions, futuristic but complex directed energy weapons and its own growing arsenal of drones, the Pentagon is increasingly considering a simple and elegant solution to its growing drone problem: reinventing the cannon.
At the Technology Readiness Experimentation (T-REX) event in August, the U.S. Department of Defense tested an artificial intelligence-based autonomous robotic gun system developed by young defense entrepreneur Allen Control Systems nicknamed it the “Bullfrog”.
Consisting of a 7.62mm M240 machine gun mounted on a specially designed rotating turret and equipped with an electro-optical sensor, proprietary AI and computer vision software, the Bullfrog was designed to fire with small arms on drone targets with far more precision than the average American soldier can achieve with a standard weapon like the M4 carbine or new generation XM7 rifle. Indeed, pictures of the Bullfrog in Action released by ACS shows the truck-mounted system locking onto small drones and dropping them from the sky with just a few shots.
The Bullfrog appears effective enough against drone targets to impress DOD officials: According to According to Defense Daily, Alex Lovett, assistant secretary of defense for prototyping and experimentation in the Pentagon’s Office of Research and Engineering, told reporters at a demonstration event in August that testing of the “low cost” Bullfrog solution went “very well”. .” If the Pentagon adopts the system, it would represent the first publicly known lethal autonomous weapon in the U.S. military arsenal, according to at the Congressional Research Service. (The Office of the Secretary of Defense has not yet responded to WIRED’s request for comment.)
Shooting down small, fast drones with conventional firearms poses a significant challenge for even the most talented sniper, and the U.S. military has been studying various ways to make its small arms more effective against unmanned aerial threats . These efforts include the acquisition of small and medium caliber ammunition And “buckshot type” ammunition which can reproduce the effects of hunting rifles who have effective and proven anti-drone measures amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; radio frequencies and GPS jammers mounted on rifles to disorient incoming drones so troops do not have to carry separate, bulky anti-drone weapons like the Drone Hunter Or Night Fighter; and “smart” optics from companies like Smart shooter and ZeroMark which would allegedly allow a weapon to fire only when it locks onto the target. The army even started integrate counter-drone exercises into your basic training programpart of a broader effort make this schooling as “routine” as conventional marksmanship training.
For ACS co-founder and CEO Steve Simoni, a former Navy nuclear engineer, the best way to optimize a firearm against drone threats is not new accessories or improved training, but a combination of advanced robotics and sophisticated AI that can eliminate uncertainty. target acquisition and tracking.