Enabling the mission autonomy flywheel: The AWS four-phase approach to defense innovation

This article explores AWS's four-phase approach to developing and improving autonomous unmanned/uncrewed systems, creating a continuous "mission autonomy data flywheel":

• Pre-deployment: Uses digital engineering with digital threads, design, and twins to accelerate system development
• Deployment: Leverages edge computing and IoT services for secure, scalable system updates
• Operations: Creates unified battlefield data sharing and AI/ML decision support systems
• Post-mission: Enables continuous system evolution through secure updates, model retraining, and predictive maintenance

The approach integrates AWS services like IoT Core, IoT Greengrass, and SageMaker to create a comprehensive framework for autonomous system development, emphasizing data-driven improvement across the entire system lifecycle.