Duality AI Partners with CoVar on DARPA Program to Define Ethical Standards for Future Military Autonomous Systems

Business Wire

19-05-2025

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Duality AI, the company behind Falcon, a leading digital twin simulation platform, today announced its partnership with CoVar to support the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Autonomy Standards and Ideals with Military Operational Values (ASIMOV) program. The timely goal of ASIMOV is to establish a common framework to evaluate the ethical alignment of future autonomous systems with established U.S. military operational values, including military ethics, the laws of war, and the commander's intent.
"Falcon's capability to ingest knowledge graphs and procedurally generate simulation-ready scenarios is vital for a framework designed to evaluate the ethical readiness of an autonomous system,' says Dr. Pete Torrione, CTO of CoVar.
ASIMOV's mission is to define a way for assessing the ethical challenges posed by AI and autonomous system decision-making in complex scenarios by creating a robust, quantitative framework for evaluating their ethical readiness. As these systems rapidly transition from research labs into real-world deployment, the need for such a framework is quickly becoming imperative. To address this challenge, the program incorporates an Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) advisory group that will aid in establishing a common language for analyzing the ethical performance of autonomous systems.
Duality AI joins CoVar's multidisciplinary team as a key contributor to their ethical testing infrastructure for autonomous systems called GEARS or Gauging Ethical Autonomous Reliable Systems. Vital to GEAR's success is Falcon's capability to simulate autonomous system performance with precision, and output comprehensive data needed to analyze the efficacy of its actions against ground truth knowledge. To support these efforts, Duality is providing high-fidelity digital twins of environments, systems, and agents—both human and vehicular—enabling the creation of a wide range of operationally relevant scenarios. Falcon's seamless integration with autonomous system software allows for in-the-loop simulations, driven by synthetic data streaming from multi-modal virtual sensors including electro-optical, IR, LiDAR, and RADAR. Additionally, Falcon's flexibility to procedurally create environments and scenarios from diverse input sources is a key feature for the collaboration.
'Falcon will let us rapidly create and simulate a large variety of required ethical scenarios,' says Dr. Pete Torrione, CTO of CoVar. 'With GEARS we are defining a new mathematics of ethics, where ethical scenarios and commander's intent are represented by knowledge graphs. Falcon's capability to ingest these graphs and procedurally generate simulation-ready scenarios is vital for a framework designed to evaluate the ethical readiness of an autonomous system.'
Since its founding, Duality has been helping customers leverage digital twin simulation as the safe, ethical, and viable way for AI and autonomous systems to transition from the lab into the real world.
'We're thrilled to be partnering with CoVar on the ASIMOV program,' says Apurva Shah, CEO of Duality AI. 'As a leader in developing responsible AI/ML solutions, CoVar is the ideal partner with whom to advance one of our main goals: helping to transition AI into the real world safely, responsibly, and reliably. During a time of justifiable apprehension about the increasing role of AI in our world, leveraging Falcon towards evolving more ethical AI is a critical endeavor and we're honored to partner with CoVar and contribute to this important program.'
With ASIMOV, Duality joins a team of professors of Ethics, widely published authors in the fields of Ethics and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Trust, engineers, and ethicists with combat command experience. Through the learnings from this program, the GEARS quantitative approach will have a broader impact throughout the autonomy community.
About Duality AI
Duality AI is the software company behind the Falcon digital twin simulation platform. Organizations today are leveraging Falcon to help solve complex problems in AI, robotics, and smart system engineering. By bringing high-fidelity digital twins of environments and operating systems into Falcon, Duality's customers generate accurate data and predictive behavior modeling that enables them to deploy automated systems robustly and at scale. Duality's multidisciplinary team includes world-class engineers, simulation specialists, AI/ML experts and award-winning technical artists with over 70 patents across robotics, simulation, and visualization.
About CoVar
CoVar has over ten years of experience innovating and implementing advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) solutions for defense, industrial, commercial, and medical sectors. CoVar's research team of principal investigators are recognized subject matter experts in the field and lead teams capable of combining big-company reliability and traceability with small company agility and flexibility. The company has developed and delivered state-of-the-art implementations of advanced algorithms in easy-to-use software packages across multiple platforms and stacks. CoVar has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to provide end-to-end solutions that bring game-changing AI/ML technology to implemented software that reliably and effectively improve customer capability.