Behind the Scenes of Project Carrera: How Our $100M Investment in Distributed Teaming is Evolving Crewed-Uncrewed Operations
From self-driving cars to helpful robotic assistants, the human-machine team is a powerful duo that can help make life safer and more productive. Now expand that dynamic to a team of diverse, distributed autonomous systems partnering with piloted aircraft. Pilots need enhanced survivability and an information advantage to make more effective decisions that ensure our forces stay ahead of emerging threats in today’s highly contested and non-permissive airspace. We are investing $100 million in distributed teaming technologies to not only deliver those capabilities today, but also upgrade them with near-, mid- and long-term enhancements.
Collaboration between man and machine is not a novel concept; however, we are aligning that concept with today’s complex battlespace by evolving it into something comprehensive: distributed teaming. With distributed teaming, pilots can extend the reach of networked sensors, increase the survivability of piloted platforms, and enable data collection, fusion and distribution that informs their decisions and achieves tactical execution. This is what is needed now, and this is what we are accomplishing with Project Carrera.
Project Carrera is Lockheed Martin’s $100 million investment in teaming technologies to enable a future vision for distributed teaming in support of our customer’s Joint All-Domain Operations vision. Project Carrera brings to bear nearly a decade of Lockheed Martin expertise in distributed architecture efforts and will leverage investments and advanced technologies from across the enterprise and customer communities to fully explore what optimal 5th Generation distributed teams can look like.
Core to our approach is partnering survivable crewed platforms, like the F-35, with affordable, modular uncrewed assets, like SPEED RACER. Project Carrera will incorporate phased demonstrations of capability upgrades in operational scenarios, incrementally introducing the JADO technology stack and experimentation, digital engineering, human-machine interfaces capable of autonomy and artificial intelligence (AI), and more.
As Project Carrera proves out optimal collaborative combat air teaming, its demonstrations will incorporate 21st Century Security solutions. In today’s networked battlespace, connected systems need to share data between and among platforms with different data links and security environments. We are using open architectures to enable the quick and affordable integration of new capabilities for the warfighter at the tactical edge; As a result, the systems in operation today and tomorrow will be able to share information for a comprehensive view of the battlespace, allowing pilots to make better decisions, faster.