General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) has integrated the Optix platform into its System for Tasking And Real-Time Exploitation (STARE) system. Optix delivers cloud-based, big data processing and analytics to STARE, providing operators with a common operating picture by integrating and displaying wide area surveillance information gathered by GA-ASI Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) and commercial space-based and terrestrial data sources.

The new Optix capabilities enable customers to easily task and direct Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets in real time, as well as to automatically identify and classify objects of interest using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) techniques. In addition, it rapidly exploits and correlates data collected from RPA, commercial satellites, and other sources into an easily shared common operational picture (COP). Having multi-source correlated data enables automatic detection of anomalous behaviors, such as dark vessels, ship-to-ship transfers, and Economic Exclusive Zone violations.

“STARE improves user experience while decreasing personnel requirements,” said Darren Moe, senior director of Automation, Autonomy, and Artificial Intelligence (A3I) for GA-ASI. “The addition of Optix enables GA to help our customers more easily decipher and apply the vast amounts of sensor data produced by both government and commercial ISR platforms and accelerates the speed of decisions. This will ultimately save lives, secure resources, deter conflicts and give us safer conditions in any domain.”

STARE provides end users with actionable intelligence. When anomalous behaviors are detected from the AI/ML models, alerts will now be generated for the end user to evaluate; these alerts include spatio-temporal location, details of the anomaly, and data sources used by the detection. By automating the detections at scale, STARE decreases the number of people required to monitor and decipher all of the various feeds, while increasing the accuracy and delivery of critical intelligence to decision-makers.

Optix was developed by General Atomics’ Commonwealth Computer Research, Inc. (CCRi), a company GA acquired in 2021. It has been deployed in production environments globally, for both commercial and government related use cases.