Come 2021, an autonomous fighter drone may compete against piloted plane in war games being planned by the US Air Force.

Air Force researchers, as reported by Air Force Magazine, are developing an autonomous aircraft controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) to test it against a human pilot in air-to-air combat.

Though details are still scarce about what the autonomous fighter drone would look like, but it could eventually lead to unmanned fighter aircraft that uses AI to make quicker decisions.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) team is pushing the boundaries of what the military can build, compared to the aircraft that already fill the service’s squadrons, Air Force Magazine quoted Lt Gen Jack Shanahan, director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, as saying.

For the uninitiated, the project of an unmanned, AI-driven fighter jet first emerged from the Pentagon in 2018.

The AFRL team is hopeful that the project will be successful so that it can be a part of the host of other AI-enabled systems the Air Force wants to add to its inventory, right from maintenance to battle planning software.