DARPA seeks to develop ways to swarm unmanned vehicles for better military reconnaissance
ARLINGTON, Va., 8 Dec. 2016. U.S. military researchers want to work with industry to develop ways to swarmunmanned vehicles inside cities and towns to enhance reconnaissance capabilities and identify threats to U.S. and allied military forces from standoff ranges.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., will brief industry on the upcoming OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on 30 Jan. 2017 at the DARPA Conference Center, 675 N. Randolph St., in Arlington, Va.
The OFFSET program will develop a game-based open architecture develop and test swarm tactics for specially designed swarming unmanned systems in urban operations.
In addition, DARPA researchers hope that such swarm systems also may lead to new enabling technologies for swarming unmanned vehicles, such as distributed perception, robust and resilient communications, dispersed computing and analytics, and adaptive collective behaviors, DARPA officials say.
Urban environments are complex, dynamic, and unpredictable, and present a major challenge in modern security and civil operations, researchers explain. Benefits, however, may be worth dealing with the complexity when swarming unmanned vehicles work with human ground personnel, experts say.
Swarming unmanned vehicles may increased standoff distances for detection and identification of potential dangers, offer increased safety and surveillance, and enhance intelligence preparation of the battlespace, DARPA officials say.
A formal solicitation for the DARPA OFFSET program (DARPA-SN-17-02) should be released on or near 30 Jan. 2017.
The program will advance two key areas to increase the effectiveness of small-unit combat forces operating in the urban environment: swarm autonomy for agile, complex, collective behaviors for intelligent movement, decisions, and interactions with the environment; and human-swarm teaming, enabling swarm commanders to infer, interact with, and influence swarm system behaviors.
The project also seeks to enhance understanding of key enabling technologies for unmanned swarm tactics with a test bed game environment that will help researchers experiment with new and evolving swarm tactics.
Related: DARPA rounds out Gremlins program with four companies to create overwhelming drone swarms
Emphasis will be on open software and systems architectures, game software design and game-based community development, immersive interactive technologies, and robotic systems integration and algorithm development for distributed robotics.
Those interested in attending the DARPA OFFSET program industry briefings should register online no later than 25 Jan. 2017 at http://www.eiseverywhere.com//ehome/207084.
Email questions or concerns to the DARPA OFFSET program manager, Timothy Chung, at [email protected].
More information is online at https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/DARPA-SN-17-02/listing.html.
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John Keller | Editor
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
