DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) was formed to explore tactics to be used by systems of over a hundred unmanned air and/or ground drones. Recently, the group conducted their second field experiment, which took place at Fort Benning, Georgia, where teams of autonomous air and ground robots tested tactics on a mission to isolate an urban objective. Read more for the video and additional information.
An advanced human-swarm interface will eventually enable users to monitor and direct hundreds of unmanned platforms simultaneously in real time. The program leverages rapidly emerging immersive and intuitive interactive technologies (augmented and virtual reality, voice-, gesture-, and touch-based) to create a novel command interface with immersive situational awareness and decision presentation capabilities. This real-time, networked virtual environment would support a physics-based, swarm tactics game where players use the interface to rapidly explore, evolve, and evaluate swarm tactics to see which would potentially work best.
