SAN MATEO, CA, May 23, 2025 – Duality AI has 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 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.
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 transition from research labs into deployment, the need for such a framework is imperative. To address this challenge, the program incorporates an Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications (ELSI) advisory group that help establish a common language for analyzing autonomous system ethics.
Duality AI joins CoVar’s team as a contributor to their ethical testing infrastructure for autonomous systems called GEARS (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 provides high-fidelity digital twins of environments, systems, and agents, both human and vehicular, enabling the creation of diverse, operationally relevant scenarios. Falcon integrates with autonomous system software to facilitate in-the-loop simulations using synthetic data from multi-modal virtual sensors, including electro-optical, IR, LiDAR, and RADAR. Its ability to procedurally generate environments and scenarios from various input sources is a key aspect of 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 supported customers in using digital twin simulation to facilitate the transition of AI and autonomous systems from development to real-world applications.
“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, published authors in the fields of Ethics and AI/ML Learning Trust, engineers, and ethicists with combat command experience. Through the learnings from this program, the GEARS quantitative approach will have an impact throughout the autonomy community.
Source: Duality AI
About Duality AI
Duality AI specializes in digital twin simulation technology to support the safe and ethical deployment of AI and autonomous systems. The company develops Falcon, a high-fidelity digital twin simulation platform that models’ environments, systems, and agents, including humans and vehicles. These simulations enable detailed testing and validation of autonomous operations across industries such as automotive, aerospace, defense, and industrial automation. Duality AI integrates synthetic data from multiple sensor types to facilitate in-the-loop simulations and procedural scenario generation. Duality AI focuses on bridging the gap between laboratory development and real-world application of AI through simulation-based validation. The company’s multidisciplinary team includes engineers, simulation specialists, AI/ML experts, and technical artists, holding over 70 patents in robotics, simulation, and visualization.
About CoVar
CoVar Applied Technologies, based in Berkeley, CA, develops advanced robotics and AI solutions for complex, dynamic environments. Founded in 2019, the company designs intelligent robotic systems for industries including defense, agriculture, construction, and manufacturing. Its products feature autonomous robots equipped with advanced sensing and navigation to perform tasks such as inspection and maintenance under challenging conditions. The company’s research team combines knowledge with agile development practices to deliver reliable, scalable automation solutions. The work of CoVar focuses on robotic autonomy, situational awareness, and adaptive control to enhance operational efficiency and safety across multiple sectors.