TILT Autonomy is excited to announce a new partnership with the Air Force’s Blue Horizons program to prototype a capability for rescuing downed pilots with autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs).

The Blue Horizons program, which reports directly to the US Air Force Chief of Staff, educates mid-career military officers to become “battle-ready entrepreneurs capable of leading positive, disruptive change.” Backed by funding from Air Force Research Labs (AFRL), each year Blue Horizons fellows partner with industry to execute innovative projects then brief their results to the Air Force‘s top leadership. Numerous Blue Horizons prototypes have transitioned and scaled beyond the academic environment.

Blue Horizons partnered with TILT Autonomy as its industry partner. TILT will leverage expertise in automated guidance, navigation, and control as well as hardware and software it has developed over the past two years for various defense customers. 

TILT is an engineering-led company focused on meeting complex mission challenges with scalable, dependable, and high-performance autonomous systems. TILT engineers possess deep expertise in autonomous systems and have past affiliations including the Defense Innovation Unit, Anduril, and Stanford University.

CEO Ryan Beall founded TILT Autonomy in 2022 after a tour in the U.S. Navy, which culminated in founding and leading Rogue Squadron, a drone and counter-drone engineering team at the Defense Innovation Unit. He is a former Navy MH-60S pilot with expertise in personnel rescue missions.

“This collaboration demonstrates how the military and industry can come together to tackle high-stakes challenges through smart engineering and creative problem-solving,” said Ryan Beall, CEO of TILT Autonomy. “With a focused approach, we can take ambitious concepts and prove their feasibility in just a matter of months—laying the groundwork for scalable solutions that meet the needs of today’s warfighter.”

A successful project could have implications beyond personnel rescue. U.S. military leaders acknowledge a pressing need for more autonomous systems, particularly in the Pacific. The War in Ukraine has demonstrated the importance of attritable mass, but the U.S. has struggled to field autonomous systems at scale. TILT’s autonomous conversion technology could provide another avenue for autonomy, by supplementing bespoke military systems with converted commercial vessels already in a theater.

TILT Autonomy’s partnership with Blue Horizons reflects the company’s ethos of partnering directly with innovative, fast-moving government organizations to execute engineering projects at the speed of relevance.