Drone Swarm Will Help Military in Urban Warfare

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Researchers envision swarms of more than 250 autonomous vehicles – multi-rotor aerial drones, and ground rovers – to gather information and assist troops in “concrete canyon” surroundings where line-of-sight, satellite-based communication is impaired by buildings.

The information the swarms collect can help keep US troops more safe, and civilians in the battle areas more safe as well.

The US DoD has awarded a team of researchers $7.1 million to develop a drone swarm infrastructure to help the US military in urban combat. The goal is to develop a technology which would allow troops to control scores of unmanned air and ground vehicles at a time.

The contract is part of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s OFFSET program, short for Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics.

An Oregon State University computer science professor is part of the team. Julie A. Adams of OSU’s College of Engineering is on one of two teams of “swarm systems integrators” whose job is to develop the system infrastructure and integrate the work of the “sprint” teams that will focus on swarm tactics, swarm autonomy, human-swarm teaming, physical experimentation and virtual environments.

According to oregonstate.edu, Raytheon BBN, a key research and development arm of the Raytheon Company, leads Adams’ team. The team also includes Smart Information Flow Technologies, a research and development firm. Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense technology company, heads the other team of integrators.

“Our focus is on the individuals who will be deployed with the swarms, and our intent is to develop enhanced interactive capabilities: speech, gestures, a head tilt, tactile interaction. If a person is receiving information from a swarm, he might have a belt that vibrates. We want to make the interaction immersive and more understandable for humans and enable them to interact with the swarm,” said Adams.

Adams noted that China last summer launched a record swarm of 119 fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles.

“Right now we don’t have the infrastructure available for testing the capabilities of large swarms,” Adams said. “Advances have been made with indoor systems, including accurately tracking individual swarm members and by using simulations.. Those approaches allow for testing and validation of some system aspects but they don’t allow for full system validation.”

The integrators’ objective is for operators to interact with the swarm as a whole, or subgroups of the swarm, and not individual agents – like a football coach orchestrating his entire offense as it runs a play.