Mil Tech — Swarming an Enemy
Dec 01 2009
Bees swarm to protect themselves during a move to a new hive location — and the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) plans on using the concept of swarming for more offensive operations.
NAVAIR recently demonstrated autonomous operations of multiple swarms of unmanned air, ground and sea vehicles, unattended ground sensors, video cameras, and other devices.
The operations, conducted at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration facility on Wallops Island, Va., were powered by EdgeFrontier, a platform technology developed by Augusta Systems Inc. of Morgantown, W. Va., which was awarded a $1.3 million contract to test and enhance the intelligent network.
The EdgeFrontier network enables the vehicles and devices to act on their own, in an autonomous manner, based on the data sent from their own swarm or other swarms.
“This capability of managing multiple swarms of unmanned vehicles and sensors is a significant achievement,” says Patrick Esposito, Augusta Systems president and CEO.
He points out that during the demonstration, EdgeFrontier “enhanced real-time information sharing and response by enabling intelligent connectivity among the various unmanned vehicles and other surveillance devices. This integration was more robust than basic networking,” he adds, “as EdgeFrontier supported processing and sharing of data in the field and enabled the unmanned vehicles and other devices to respond to events based upon rules and policies configured within the software.”
In the Wallops Island demonstration, the EdgeFrontier system was used to integrate and normalize data and events and control functions from sensors and cameras on-board Aerosonde Mk3 Vice III small unmanned aircraft systems from AAI Corp., inside unmanned ground vehicles, and in the field with video cameras and unattended ground sensors from Crane Wireless Monitoring Solutions.
EdgeFrontier also created an operator system interface, featuring a map based display, relying on third-party geospatial software, for the real-time viewing of the unmanned vehicle locations and the status, as well as sensor and camera data.
Future military conflicts, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s SWARMS project, will see sensors and small, unmanned vehicles networked into groups that need little or no supervision from humans. The challenge will lie in managing large groups of such swarms.
About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz., freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He’s also the author of the historical mystery, Full Moon.
