WASHINGTON — SandboxAQ, a quantum and artificial intelligence company, announced on Tuesday it has entered into two new agreements with the Army to help the service explore using AI to help find new materials to build faster, cheaper, longer-lasting and more sustainable armored vehicles, electric vehicles and drones.
First, the company, which spun off from Google parent company Alphabet in 2022, has teamed with Army Futures Command’s C5ISR Center to use quantitative AI software — machine learning algorithms that process and analyze large amounts of numerical and physical data — to develop battery chemistries and designs for the use of EVs, UAVs and portable power solutions, according to Jen Sovada, president of SandboxAQ’s Global Public Sector division.
Sovada, who said she wasn’t at liberty to discuss the pricetag on either contract, said that most batteries used for EVs and similar vehicles today are powered in part by rare earth minerals such as lithium, which have short shelf lives. Using AI-generated molecular compounds, SandboxAQ and the Army hope to create materials that are more sustainable.
“Some of the implications [of this program] are that we now have batteries or, hopefully we’ll have batteries, that are not reliant on rare earth minerals,” Sovada told Breaking Defense. “We don’t have to rely on those coming from adversarial nations such as China, where a large majority of the rare earth minerals are located. We now are able to look at how ecologically friendly they are to the environment and create batteries that produce less waste, that are less toxic and have longer shelf lives.”
The second agreement is with the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Ground Vehicle Systems Center, responsible for building armored vehicles. There, SandboxAQ will partner with another firm, Comprehensive Carbon Impact — which it says is dedicated to help solve climate change — to use its quantitative AI software to find “novel alloy materials” specifically for armored vehicles, according to a SandboxAQ press release.
The company contends that new materials could increase the mobility, survivability and eco-friendliness of vehicles while decreasing their weight, cost and toxicity. Sovada said that the Army should also be able to use the tech to simulate prototype testing, which she said would save time, money and materials — a long-stated goal by the Army in its push to rely more on digital engineering.
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“It’s very similar to what you see in drug discovery where drug discovery takes an average of 16 years. When you use that simulation to simulate the molecular compounds and the molecular structures, you can actually knock off between seven and 10 years in that discovery and testing cycle,” Sovada said.
Related: Army electric vehicle goals ‘pretty darn achievable,’ but challenges remain
Using generative AI to find new materials may sound promising, but it’s proven to be a difficult feat. Late last year, Google announced that it had found “millions of new materials“ with AI, but later reports suggested that most of these materials that were predicted were in reality “nonsensical.”
To ensure that the materials SandboxAQ finds and develops are usable, Sovada said SandboxAQ works closely with its customers to develop a smaller variety of molecules or materials that are closely tailored to the customer’s needs.
“We’re not just connecting molecules and saying, ‘Hey we built this new molecule.’ It is based on the requirements that our customers have, and what that enables us to do is to really test based on all of the different parameters that we have,” Sovada said. “What we do is instead of [giving] them 200 million [molecules or materials], we give them 50 to look at, or 10 to look at and then they can take those 10 and try them in the laboratory.”
Should either contract produce successful results, they could aid the Army in its ambitious quest to hybridize its tactical fleet by 2035 and have an exclusively electric fleet by 2050. Sovada said SandboxAQ hopes to work with other military branches following its work with the Army. The Army did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.