Purdue, Saab team up to study use of AI in battlespace threat awareness

July 4, 2023

Monday, July 3, 2023 02:54 PM EDT
By Carley Lanich
Saab West Lafayette Facility Exterior
(photo courtesy of Saab)
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University researchers will be partnering with Sweden-based aerospace manufacturer Saab to study new technology in battlespace situational awareness. Their research will focus on how to use artificial intelligence to automatically detect threats in complex environments, according to a Purdue news release. Researchers say they will study how to use camera and radar sensors to detect, for example, whether a flying object near an airport is a bird or a drone, and whether that object is adversarial. Associate professors Shaoshuai Mou and Shreyas Sundaram — co-directors of Purdue’s Institute for Control, Optimization and Networks, or ICON — will serve as co-principal investigators for the project. Their work could first be applied to naval unmanned surface vessels and later used in military radar systems and commercial airport applications. The project is called the Threat and Situational Understanding with Networked-Online Machine Intelligence, or TSUNOMI, program and comes at a time when threats to critical military and civilian infrastructure are on the rise. “There is an urgent need to create technological solutions that allow networks of sensors equipped with sophisticated AI to quickly detect and identify potential threats,” Sundaram said in a news release. The partnership stems from a $13 million grant the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research recently awarded to Saab, which will filter about $4.3 million of its grant to Purdue through a four-year subcontract. Purdue’s funding is expected to support graduate students and some faculty time spent on the project, as well as to purchase sensors. ICON includes 84 faculty among its ranks from Purdue’s colleges of engineering, science and agriculture, as well as from the Purdue Polytechnic Institute. The TSUNOMI program comes as one of ICON’s first large initiatives with Saab, which opened a multi-million dollar, advanced manufacturing facility in 2021 at West Lafayette’s Discovery Park District near the Purdue campus. “TSUNOMI is a great win for the Saab and Purdue partnership,” Saab President and CEO Erik Smith said in the release. “This program represents a real step toward robust and trusted artificial intelligence.”