Air Force Tests IBM's Brain-Inspired Chip as an Aerial Tank Spotter

Satellites, aircraft, and growing numbers of drones--the U.S. Air Force has a lot of electronic eyes in the sky. Now it's exploring whether brain-inspired computer chips could give those systems the smarts to do things like automatically identify vehicles such as tanks or anti-aircraft systems. The Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) reports good results from using a "neuromorphic" chip made by IBM to identify military and civilian vehicles in radar-generated aerial imagery. The unconventional chip got the job done about as accurately as a regular high-powered computer, using less than a 20th of the energy. The AFRL awarded IBM a contract worth $550,000 in 2014 to become the first paying customer of its brain-inspired TrueNorth chip. It processes data using a network of one million elements designed to mimic the neurons of a mammalian brain, connected by 256 million "synapses."