Teams will leverage digital twin simulation as part of a novel approach for benchmarking AI’s alignment with established ethics principles.
May 21, 2025, San Mateo, CA — Duality AI, the company behind Falcon, a leading digital twin simulation platform, today announced its partnership with Kitware 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.
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 Societal Implications (ELSI) advisory group which will aid in establishing a common language for analyzing the ethical performance of autonomous systems.
Duality AI joins Kitware’s team as a key contributor to their Reference Ethical Benchmark for Autonomy Readiness (REBAR) approach. Vital to REBAR’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 virtual electro-optical, IR, LiDAR, and RADAR sensors. Lastly, Falcon’s capability to integrate large language models (LLMs) will also play a key role for diverse scenario creation.
“High-quality synthetic data, without question, is vital to our project, but it’s Falcon’s flexibility that made it a perfect fit for REBAR,” says Dr. Arslan Basharat, Assistant Director at Kitware, and principal investigator on DARPA ASIMOV. “The REBAR approach leverages an LLM to execute expert-informed generation of hundreds of variations of any situation of interest. Falcon’s ability to integrate such LLMs will enable us to carry out rapid, procedural conversion of these generated situations into simulation-ready scenarios. This greatly reduces the barrier to testing autonomous systems in the wide variety of situations necessary to assess their ethical readiness in a military operational context.”
Since its founding, Duality has been championing digital twin simulation as the safe, ethical, and viable way for AI and autonomous systems to transition from the lab into the real world.
“Kitware’s team already has a proven reputation in ethical AI systems, and we’re thrilled to be partnering with them on the ASIMOV program,” says Apurva Shah, CEO of Duality AI. “From early on, Duality’s mission has been to build virtual worlds to solve real problems. During a time when everyone is understandably apprehensive about the role autonomous systems will play in our world, being able to contribute to the evolution of more ethical autonomy and AI is a critical pursuit. We’re honored that Falcon is playing a role in that.”
Participating in a multifaceted program like ASIMOV, brings Duality together with top teams from diverse fields, including Charles River Analytics, the University of Pennsylvania, Shadowbox LLC, David Barnes LLC, and Veraitech. If successful, their combined work on the ASIMOV program will be the seed of a foundational benchmark for evaluating future military autonomous systems, with the potential to influence standards and practices across the wider 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 Kitware
Kitware delivers innovation to its customers. As a software research and development company, Kitware solves the world’s most complex scientific challenges using custom software solutions built on open source technology. In addition to custom software development, the company also offers technical support and training services to anyone using its open source tools. Since its founding in 1998, Kitware has developed a reputation for its unparalleled technical expertise and excellent customer service. The company is proud to be 100% employee-owned. For additional information, visit kitware.com or follow them onTwitter and LinkedIn.
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Mish Sukharev
press@duality.ai