Exclusive: Air Force taps AIM for autonomous air base construction
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AIM, a company automating heavy-duty machinery and earthworks, secured nearly $5 million in U.S. Air Force contracts for remote air base construction and runway repair.
Why it matters: American power projection — its ability to be anywhere at any time — relies on far-flung outposts and depots. Building and maintaining them is manual-labor intensive, putting people in the potential line of fire.
- "There might be craters. There might be debris. Infrastructure might get severed," AIM CEO Adam Sadilek told Axios. "Our machines are really good at fixing those types of problems, and doing it in a way where there are no humans involved."
Zoom in: AIM retrofits vehicles, like excavators, dozers and loaders, to make them fully autonomous. It's proven the process in the mining and construction industries, and is now plunging into the defense market.
- "If you look at a classic mine site, it's almost as hostile as a lot of the military settings," Sadilek said.
- "Essentially all mine sites are remote, in areas where it's way too hot or way too cold. There's minimal to no connectivity, unless you somehow bring it there. It's areas that are not very desirable for humans to be."
How it works: Airfield repair would, in this case, involve machinery mapping a location, clearing debris and ordnance from it and patching up problems.
The intrigue: The company, based in the Seattle region, previously worked with the Army on de-mining efforts. The service wants to robotize that kind of high-stakes work.
The bottom line: "You can have the best fighter jets and drones and vehicles of war, but if they don't have a place to take off from, or get charged and refueled, or to do maintenance on, or come back home to, they are very inefficient or ineffectual, or they might as well not exist in some sense," Sadilek said.
