There is no doubt that drones have become a fundamental tool in the war scenario. Both with regard to the analysis of the battlefield and the direct attack section, either with weapons “on board” or when they become a weapon in themselves, calling themselves kamikazes. And therefore it is not strange that the powers of the world seek to develop countermeasuress. That’s when Bullfrog is born.
At the Technology Repair and Experimentation (T-REX) event, the United States Department of Defense demonstrated this machine gun, basically an AI-controlled autonomous robotic weapon system. But there is more.
Bullfrog has been developed by the company Allen Control Systems (ACS), which signed a contract with the United States Department of Defense to develop countermeasure strategies in drone attacks. ACS is led by Steve Simoni, a US Navy nuclear engineer and obviously experienced on the battlefield.
In a recent interview, Simoni noted that “the battlefield of the future will be full of incredible autonomous robots like ours, shooting at each other. I don’t think there’s much room for people with guns.”.
To be honest, Bullfrog is not simply a machine gun, in the same way that a smartphone is not a phone. On the one hand, there is the ballistic part, so to speak: a 7.62-millimeter M240 machine gun mounted on a rotating turret. The advantage of the selected ammunition is that it is well known, versatile and very economical compared to other projectiles.
Then we have its architectural part, which facilitates its installation on different platforms, from tanks, battle tanks, ships… And finally there is its brain: an electro-optical sensor. This works largely thanks to an AI created by ACS whose function is to identify possible drone trajectorieseven of small size, and knock them down.
Bullfrog’s artificial intelligence It starts processing the images thanks to its sensors. The second step is to differentiate drones from other objects and at that moment calculate the trajectory to shoot.
The real change comes thanks to AI that continually learns: the environment, the evasive maneuvers and the shots fired. With all this, your precision improves after each encounter. To this we must add that it can work alone or together with other Bullfrog to coordinate a defense area.
One of the Pentagon’s demands (at least for now) is that all weapons, even those with AI, have the human option as the first and last resort: the person who decides is the human being. Therefore, the ACS system is capable of performing all tasks up to the last stepbut it needs a human to press the shutter. Even if it’s at a distance. But not forever.
Brice Cooper, director of strategy at ACS, noted that Bullfrog “It is prepared to be totally autonomous. “We are just waiting for the Government to determine their needs.” Bottom line: if the law changes, this weapon might not depend on human intervention.
“A year ago, no one was really worried about the small drones that were destroying all types of armored vehicles in Ukraine. “Now, we’re in the very nascent stages of what the unmanned threat landscape will look like, and it’s going to involve serious investment from the Department of Defense,” Cooper concludes.