Pentagon Looks for Easy Way to Control Swarms of Drones

The US Department of Defense is looking for technology that would allow soldiers to use simple gestures or voice commands to control dozens of small drones swarming a battlefield.

The idea of a drone swarm has become somewhat of a trademark of 21st century warfare. Dozens, or maybe even thousands, of low-cost machines, swarming over a battlefield, are supposed to pose a threat that would be difficult, ammo-consuming and downright costly to deter with conventional anti-aircraft weaponry. This rapidly developing technology has already found its place in video games, such as the Call Of Duty series. It has yet to become a reality.

While a single drone could be controlled using a remote controller, almost like a toy car, controlling a whole swarm of machines poses quite a task for mathematicians and engineers, the kind of task that best universities in the world are fighting to crack.

Such swarms can be controlled by a computer, as programs like the Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) or Micro-Autonomous Systems Technology (MAST) have proven. But how would a soldier on a battlefield control such a computer, leading a swarm to do what is needed, easily and quickly?

The Offensive Swarm Enabled Tactics Program (OFFSET), is supposed to be the solution. This program seeks to develop "an advanced human-swarm interface to enable users to monitor and direct potentially hundreds of unmanned platforms simultaneously in real time", as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the US's top military tech development agency put it in a statement Wednesday.

According to program manager Timothy Chung, "this work could also bring entirely new scalable, dynamic capabilities to the battlefield, such as distributed perception, robust and resilient communications, dispersed computing and analytics, and adaptive collective behaviors."

"Distributed perception" can be glimpsed by watching Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" movie, where Batman uses a fictional technology that uses hundreds of mobile phones to create a virtual 3D model of a city. If created in reality, such technology would create the ultimate surveillance tool, one that wouldn't suffer from the weaknesses of spy satellites or high-altitude drones equipped with cameras.

The technology to control swarms of drones will be tested in a specially designed virtual reality environment that would allow future operators to "rapidly explore, evolve, and evaluate swarm tactics to see which would potentially work best on various unmanned platforms in the real world," according to DARPA.

In a perfect world, the US military would like to get a system that would be able to process vague human commands and convert them to machine directives to dozens of UAVs.

"Say we know what Patrick looks like and have something flying around and on the ground. We can say, ‘We're looking for Patrick because he's a bad actor. Find him.' Then the system can take a photo and say, ‘We found him. This is where they're located,'" Marine Lieutenant Colonel James Richardson Jr. said in 2015.

Small drones could provide assistance in dense urban areas, where infantry faces heavy resistance from deeply entrenched enemies, such as in battles for Aleppo in Syria or Mosul in Iraq, and where large, heavy armored vehicles pose an easy target for an RPG-armed terrorist.

Interestingly, a subsidiary of Russia's Rostech, United Instrument Manufacturing Corporation, claimed at the end of October that it is in possession of a simple, low-cost, yet very effective weapon that could take down dozens of swarming drones in one shot.