Drones swarms, tens or hundreds of vehicles not manned by coordinated flight are becoming one of the key tools of military technology. Now, a new Piloting Program for L3Harris drones, allows a single operator to control several drones in Several types of vehicles in different domains during evidence managed by the Government, and could expand it to thousands.
Development occurs at a time when the pentagon struggles to find a way to manage drone swarms in a conflict plagued by electromagnetic attacks on communications. To achieve the desired scale, The company uses an approach that minimizes the exchange of data between the operator and the swarmexchange that is a greater burden for intelligence capabilities aboard the drone.
Toby Magsig, vice president and general director of Autonomous Business Solutions of L3Harris, said that the approach used in the Amorphous program, where Highly autonomous drones discover what they are doing together and collaborate with little operator participationis based on the comments that the company received from the army, the Navy and the office of the Secretary of Defense.
This feedback emphasized two things: the military need for an operator to control a large number of drones simultaneously without the devices needing to analyze and interpret a large amount of data. The final result is A software architecture where the exchange of data between the drones and the operator is reduced approximately to the size of an SMS text message. That means that swarm does not depend on a large cloud of data somewhere distant and can operate closer to the battlefield without long communication threads.
“We are looking for very small messages that do not require intense bandwidth and They do not consume a large amount of processing power so that those small assets and low cost can consume and interoperate, “Magsig explains in a statement.
Drones must discover how to carry out different aspects of the mission with limited instructions and a minimum of conversation between them. Indeed, he said, “They offer” different operations or behaviors depending on where they arewhat they can do and what they know about the rest of the swarm. All this happens in a way that the operator can see, but without having to give many specific instructions.
“For example, a search area is designated and said: ‘Hey, search in this area’. A polygon with basic points is drawn. They receive it and say: ‘Hey, we have just received the search order. I’m here. I will look in this area ‘. The other receives a message and says: ‘Okay, I will search. I’m here. I will do this. ‘ And then this process is repeated, ”adds Magsig. This approach reduces the amount of tasks that drones have to discover how to do, he said, saving them processing power for other tasks.
Even that level of so low communication bandwidth continues to provide data to the operator. “When you assign a task to a swarm -says Magsig -, you can see the behaviors that are about to perform, so You feel comfortable as a user in terms of what you have asked for that swarm to doand then things like real -time capacity to change and adjust tasks based on emerging mission requirements. ”
The approach that Amorphous uses is A change with respect to the control level of the operator that characterized the operation of the drones During US operations in the Middle East, when analysts sat and patiently observed hundreds of live coverage hours of drones.
But the most important aspect of control, the ability to stop the automated processes that do not follow the intention of the commanders, is still there, designed in the system as an emergency stop function. “So that If a user ever does not feel comfortable with the behaviors that the swarm has exhibitedthe human always has control, simply press that button, ”concludes Magsig.