Applied Intuition's Digital Proving Grounds Test Multi-Vendor Military Autonomy Before It Ships

The military is moving quickly toward autonomous systems — drones, boats, and ground vehicles able to perceive, understand, and plan, often working in groups rather than alone. Today, validating whether those systems work together usually means putting real vehicles in real places: physical exercises can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per vehicle, happen only a few times a year, and cover just a fraction of the scenarios needed for mission readiness. Because each vendor builds in isolation, integration failures often surface during the exercise itself, making the testing bottleneck the primary constraint on fielding autonomous systems at scale. Applied Intuition says it has refined its alternative over nearly a decade working with commercial autonomous vehicle developers, and that lessons from millions of simulation miles in the automotive space now transfer to defense as a dual-use advantage.

Applied Intuition recently partnered with the Pentagon's Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering on a DPG called Virtual Readiness and Experimentation (VREX), testing separate autonomous vehicles operating in the air, on the sea, and submerged under water — all built by different companies — on a single unified mission. VREX needed a shared command and control interface for the different vehicle types, which Applied Intuition supplied as part of the DPG, plus a testing platform that could work quickly at real scale. The first major event saw dozens of government visitors across agencies witness a mission that successfully integrated surface and air vehicles across multiple vendors. The approach is now being scaled across the Department of War through the Chief Digital and AI Office's Autonomy Factory program, where Applied Intuition's platform will serve as shared testing and integration infrastructure for DOW programs.

Every simulated run and every real-world event feeds a shared library of information, and new problems discovered are added to future tests automatically, so each round of testing is smarter than the last — a feedback flywheel rather than a series of one-off events. In the old model, a test event produced a pass-or-fail result and was mostly filed away; because DPGs run continuously and keep memory of everything learned, testing becomes an ongoing source of insight that shapes what gets built next and how quickly new capabilities reach the field. The payoff Applied Intuition describes is systems arriving already tested through thousands of scenarios, with collaborative behaviors validated, so warfighters get autonomous systems they can trust before they reach the battlefield.