Palantir Technologies has secured a $480-million contract to begin the prototyping phase for the US Army’s Maven Smart System project.
Maven is an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tool that fuses information from various sources into a unified interface to provide faster and much-improved battlefield analysis.
It can identify military points of interest more rapidly than other battlefield analyzers, speeding up the work of intelligence analysts.
Work for the contract is expected to be completed by 2029.
Once developed, the Maven battlefield analyzer could be integrated into the US military’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) to help commanders make faster and better decisions.
Project Maven
Project Maven was launched in 2017 to address major challenges with existing AI solutions in the US military inventory.
It reportedly became the “epicenter” of American AI military efforts, utilizing commercial-off-the-shelf technologies and machine learning to automatically identify potential targets.
Among the data sources it fuses are satellite and drone imagery, full-motion video captured by other surveillance platforms, geolocation data, and intercepted communications.
Though originally designed for training only, the project garnered tremendous support from industry partners because its computer vision algorithms have proven effective in scanning targets in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.
The 18th Airborne Corps became a key testing ground for the Maven system, providing feedback that allowed the project to become a program of record by the US Department of Defense.
“AI is able to assist by filtering specific user defined parameters, sifting through large amounts of data, extracting what is relevant, and providing analysts … with near-real time data,” an army news release stated.