The Pentagon’s vision of future warfare involves teams of small autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles–in the air, on the ground, and in the water–operating in coordinated swarms to support troops on the battlefield. The military services have already held several successful tests of limited drone swarms, but before they get to a full-on unmanned mission worthy of a Richard Wagner soundtrack, they need to develop a few key pieces of technology.
DoD has used small drones for years for surveillance and other missions, and unmanned vehicles themselves have become more proficient and less expensive. But to get to the next level, swarms need the ability to better think for themselves, communicate with each other, and work in tandem with military units. “U.S. military forces currently lack the technologies to manage and interact with such swarms and the means to quickly develop and share swarm tactics suitable for application in diverse, evolving urban situations,” according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency–DARPA.
DARPA is pushing development toward getting large groups of small drones to work in swarms with its multi-vendor OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics–OFFSET–program, an effort to use a series of experimental “sprints” to rapidly advance technologies for unmanned swarms operating in urban areas. In February, DARPA awarded $7.2 million in contracts to Raytheon BBN, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin under the program–and last month, it added Charles River Analytics to that vehicle.
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