[defenseindustrydaily.com] Like
a swarm of angry bees, unmanned aerial, ground, and sea vehicles
automonously converge on enemy troops, aircraft and ships, decide what
to do, then engage the enemy with surveillance or weapons to help U.S.
forces defeat them. All this without direct human intervention. Sounds
like science fiction? The American military is one of several working
on the technology, called “swarming,” in order to make this scenario a
reality.
According to the SWARMS project at
the University of Pennsylvania, future military missions will rely on
large, networked groups of small unmanned vehicles and sensors. Groups
of this type will typically operate with little or no direct human
supervision most of the time. It will be very difficult, if not
impossible, to guarantee individual management or control in the kind
of dynamic, resource-constrained, adversarial environments that
characterize human warfare. Managing such large groups will thus be
extremely challenging, and will require the application of new,
yet-to-be-developed methods of communication, control, computation and
sensing, specifically tailored to the command and control of
large-scale, autonomous vehicle groups.
In pursuit of this bold vision, the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) recently awarded
a $1.5 million contract (N00421-07-D-0023) to Augusta Systems in
Morgantown, WV to test and enhance a distributed, intelligent network
capable of managing single and multiple swarms of unmanned air, ground
and sea vehicles, unattended ground sensors, video cameras, and other
devices.
Powered by Augusta Systems EdgeFrontier products,
the intelligent network would enable the vehicles and devices to act on
their own, in an autonomous manner, based upon data sent from their own
swarm or other swarms. Through the contract, Augusta Systems will
support testing and development of enhancements to the intelligent
network, which will need to support the following capabilities for
swarming:
- Diverse vehicle, sensor and device data integration, correlation and processing;
- Adaptive,
cooperative behavior on-board the vehicles and at the point of the
sensors and devices through third-party swarming software;
- Relay of requested data to multiple users from multiple vehicles, sensors and devices; and
- Intelligent communication, independent of user operations.
Patrick
Esposito, president and chief operating officer of Augusta Systems,
explains more about the contract and the swarming concept:
“Augusta
Systems is serving as the integrator. We are utilizing our EdgeFrontier
middleware on-board the vehicles [that function as communication nodes]
and at the point of the sensors and cameras to enable the intelligent
network, which connects the nodes. Swarming algorithms developed by our
partner Vector Research Center [formerly New Vectors], which enable the
collaborative behavior between the nodes, are driven by digital
pheromone-based maps of the area in which the swarms are operating.
This is similar to the reasoning used by insects, which was the
inspiration for the swarming concept. So, for example, the swarming
algorithm, independent of human intervention, determines where a camera
needs to look, where a UAV needs to fly, etc. EdgeFrontier takes the
instructions from the algorithm and turns them into commands for the
camera, UAV, etc. EdgeFrontier also collects data from the nodes and
feeds that data into the algorithm as feedback so it can make decisions
about what the swarm needs to do next. EdgeFrontier also manages the
communications between the nodes. In other words, our EdgeFrontier
software sits in the middle between the nodes and between the nodes and
the swarming algorithm.
“All of these features, working together, enable this
dynamic swarming system where, for example, a sensor detects something,
a UAV automatically responds to take pictures, an unmanned ground
vehicle automatically responds to the UAV’s picture data, and all the
other UAVs automatically reposition themselves to make up for the UAV
that left its position to respond to the sensor data. All of this would
occur without human intervention.”
Source: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Swarming-Drones-Will-Be-Able-to-Sting-Enemy-05540/
