In December 2018, the NRL’s Distributed autonomous systems group successfully flew a fleet of 30 miniature autonomous blimps in unison to test the swarming behavior of autonomous systems. The blimps were created by Georgia Tech scientists, which continue to provide design upgrades in collaboration with NRL’s group.
One of the goals for the NRL’s research is to understand the potential uses for swarms of autonomous systems, both defensive and offensive. Some desired emergent behaviors include protecting an asset, providing area coverage, conducting reconnaissance missions, or simply moving in formation from a point to another.
Swarming approaches developed at NRL are being bio-inspired by animal swarms, such as bees and ants. Using bio-inspired concepts such as quorum sensing, an ability that bacteria use to communicate and coordinate via signaling molecules, NRL’s team demonstrated complex group decision-making using simple agent-based behaviors. The possibility to replicate such behaviors in autonomous systems is now at the core of the research process. The NRL’s team plans to design such behaviors to scale up emergent swarming behavior to involve as many as 10,000 autonomous systems.
The NRL research project is directly linked to a future algorithm development being pursued by the US Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Center (NAWC WD). According to Flight Global, the service recently enhanced a prototype algorithm « which could coordinate missile and drone swarm attacks, to the point where it can now ensure several vehicles arrive from different directions on a single target within 250 milliseconds of each other ».
This algorithm has been successfully tested at Yuma Proving Grounds (Arizona) using four NASC TigerShark UASs, the magazine said. On NRL side, the next step will be « to fly more than 100 controlled miniature blimps this year ».