US Air Force wants AI to assist aerial refueling

The U.S. Air Force is looking to artificial intelligence to improve the performance of its aerial refueling crews. The goal is for AI to automatically analyze refueling operations from cameras mounted on the tankers and provide “hot wash” feedback to the tanker crews. According to an Air Force Small Business Innovation Research solicitation, the service wants a system that can “leverage advanced computer vision, machine learning, and aviation (flight dynamics) analytics techniques to automatically extract operationally relevant performance metrics from aerial refueling events, quantify…