Killer Swarms: The New Generation

I have an arti­cle in this months BBC Focus mag­a­zine - the world’s best sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy monthly — about swarm­ing robots. Previously I’ve looked at the poten­tial for the deploy­ment of large num­bers of bat­tle­field UAVs, but this goes into some detail about what flock­ing and swarm­ing behav­ior actu­ally mean and how they are being applied to robot­ics.

Nature is way ahead of us here. A flock of a thou­sand star­lings can maneu­ver together with ease, chang­ing flight plans from moment to moment, and with­out any cen­tral con­trol. The meth­ods they use are remark­ably sub­tle and effec­tive, and researchers are bor­row­ing these from nature to enable mul­ti­ple UAVs to oper­ate in the same air­space with­out the risk of col­li­sion. The pio­neer­ing first flight of a flock of Onyx guided para­chutes last year was a small mile­stone in unmanned flight.
Swarms are a level up from flocks. With swarms there is com­mu­ni­ca­tion between indi­vid­u­als known as stig­mergy and the result is incred­i­bly com­plex, intel­li­gent behav­ior. This is what iRo­bots Swarmbots are are about. The Swarmbots have already shown their abil­ity to co-​​operatively explore and nav­i­gate, for exam­ple search­ing an area in the most effi­cient way with­out cen­tral co-​​ordination.
But greater lev­els of inte­gra­tion are pos­si­ble than nautre can achieve. The arti­cle includes an inter­view with Prof Owen Holland who is build­ing Gridswarm:

Imagine a large group of small unmanned autonomous aer­ial vehi­cles that can fly with the agility of a flock of star­lings in a city square at dusk. Imagine link­ing their onboard com­put­ers together across a short-​​range, high-​​bandwidth wire­less net­work and con­fig­ur­ing them to form an enor­mous dis­trib­uted par­al­lel com­puter. Imagine using this huge com­pu­ta­tional resource to process the sen­sory data gath­ered by the swarm, and to direct its col­lec­tive actions. You have now grasped the idea of a fly­ing gridswarm.

The lat­est incar­na­tion of this con­cept is the Ultraswarm an indoor fly­ing clus­ter com­puter com­posed of minia­ture robot heli­copters.
Although the arti­cle con­cen­trates on civil­ian appli­ca­tions, from space explo­rar­tion to fire­fight­ing and domes­tic clean­ing, most of the really advanced work in this area is mil­i­tary.
Swarms are extremely robust, have a high level of built-​​in redun­dancy and are well suited to com­plex and rapidly-​​changing envi­ron­ments. Swarming robots are a nat­ural for the bat­tle­field. Because the indi­vid­ual ele­ments can be made small and cheap, swarms can con­sist of a very large num­ber of units and the suc­cess of this approach in nature hints at how effec­tive it is.
UAV swarms are likely to arrive sooner rather than later. Check out the Killer Bee Its a fly­ing wing with a span of less than seven feet and an air­frame made of three com­po­nents. Its thick wing means it can be released from air­craft at high speeds. It has eight-​​hour endurance with a twenty-​​pound payload.

A unique fea­ture of the KillerBees geom­e­try is that it can be stacked. Numerous planes can be stored in a small space. This, plus the abil­ity to air-​​deploy the KillerBee at high speeds, means an air­plane can release a sin­gle KillerBee for a close look at a dan­ger­ous tar­get, or it can release a swarm of KillerBees to over­whelm the defenses of a target.

As recounted in my book, Weapons Grade, things are likely to develop extremely quickly over the next few years, with swarm­ing sys­tems pro­duc­ing a trans­for­ma­tion com­pa­ra­ble to pre­ci­sion weapons. There are no tech­no­log­i­cal bar­ri­ers, just cul­tural ones.
The new par­a­digm for air power is com­ing, and it’s about to kick the door down.
– David Hambling
UPDATE: Contradictory reports over whether the drone shot down by the IDF yes­ter­day car­ried a war­head. Certainly Hezbollah are aware of the pos­si­bil­i­ties.
“You can load the Mirsad plane with a quan­tity of explo­sives rang­ing from 40 to 50 kilos and send it to its tar­get,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is quoted as say­ing in November 2004. “Do you want a power plant, water plant, mil­i­tary base? Anything!“
Range of the Mirsad-​​1 is likely to be well over 100 Km.

August 7th, 2006 | Drones | 208561 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/08/07/killer-swarms-the-new-generation/Killer+Swarms%3A+The+New+Generation2006-08-07+18%3A39%3A19matthew_tompkins You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.