European Defence Agency (EDA) launched a new project to improve technology on automatic targeting on January 13, 2023. The project also includes threat recognition and identification to enhance battlefield effectiveness.
“Automatic target/threat recognition, identification and targeting for land systems (ATRIT) can help militaries in detecting, tracking, prioritising and selecting targets, whether off the top of a combat vehicle or from individual weapons”, EDA explains. “The technology cannot engage, however, without human command.” EDA finances the first step in a series of ATRIT projects to develop and test physical demonstrators in relevant environments with a budget of €2 million over 18 months.
ATRIT programme seeks to define requirements and design the system architecture for an overarching, cross-platform capacity to allocate military targets, to enhance detection and to identify threats, including behaviour recognition performed by artificial intelligence. The new, improved software will be able to better identify and therefore enable automatic targeting and to fuse different sensor data.
German company Rheinmetall has the lead of this multinational consortium that includes IABG (also Germany), Safran and Thales (France), ISD SA (Greece), TNO and Thales (The Netherlands), Rheinmetall (Norway) and PCO (Poland).
Dorothee Frank, Head of editorial team
