AltiAir - DarkMesh
National Security Hackathon (by Army xTech)Darkmesh is a decentralized tactical command-and-control mesh that survives DDIL environments — Denied, Degraded, Intermittent, Limited connectivity. The DoD's nightmare is a near-peer fight where adversaries jam Starlink and sever cloud links. Most C2 stacks die the moment connectivity drops. Darkmesh keeps the squad's operating picture intact even when the network and the coordinating node both go down. Three Pi-class compute nodes form a closed mesh on a private LAN. Each runs local LLM inference — Gemma 4 E2B on the Jetson Orin Nano, Gemma 3 on the Pi 4Bs — fuses multimodal sensor input from camera, microphone, and RFID, and gossips a shared world state. One node is elected coordinator via Raft-style heartbeat consensus. When the leader is killed mid-pitch, another assumes command in under one second. No data loss, no awareness gap. Darkmesh answers Palantir's hackathon brief directly: orchestrating intelligence across two tiers when the link between them is unreliable. Evidence queues locally, uploads to Palantir Foundry via OSDK when uplink returns, and receives ontology-enriched cues back through the mesh. AIP Logic auto-classifies severity and drafts SITREPs. Danti provides geospatial enrichment when connected. The use case is counter-UAS cueing in controlled training environments. Camera, microphone, RFID, and provider-style location feeds correlate into evidence packages. Operators see policy-gated review cues, never autonomous engagement. Human-in-the-loop on every actionable output. Built in 24 hours by Team Altiair: Sarah Hatcher, Benjamin Shyong, Rob Grossman, Katherine Lambert. Aligned with DARPA's DICE program for distributed C2 resilience, the Pentagon's Replicator initiative for attritable autonomous systems, and USMC MAGTF-scale operations. Around $400 of edge hardware. Zero cloud assumptions. Site: darkmesh.us
