Autonomy at Sandia National Laboratories

Sophisticated autonomy operations in high consequence, adversarial environments

Introduction

Industry is investing heavily in autonomy—in areas such as self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning—but these technologies typically do not fully address national security needs. While commercial environments are rarely unstructured or contested, national security missions require operations in complex and unpredictable environments. Therefore, national security applications require different characteristics than their commercial counterparts, while also managing size, weight and power (SWaP) and bandwidth limitations. Sandia’s approach to autonomy focuses on the gaps that must be addressed to enable sophisticated operations in high consequence, adversarial environments.

Sandia’s purpose as a national security laboratory is to develop advanced technologies to ensure global peace, and therefore Sandia is always interested in new technology that can advance global security. Sandia is home to a host of engineering capabilities and can take autonomy-enabling technologies from research to development to application – providing enhanced and comprehensive functionality to the warfighter.

Our national security sponsors require highly-customized solutions that train on specialized data sets, and cannot rely on open-source data and algorithms. Sandia develops and customizes artificially-intelligent and autonomous solutions to unique national security mission context.