Buettner, Jr., Raymond R.

As unmanned system technologies continue to advance, so increases the likelihood of their use by adversaries of the future in capacities such as in swarm attacks. However, current approaches of expending high-cost solutions to address these low-cost threats is unsustainable in resource constrained contexts. In these cases, innovation can help defeat inundation. The ambitious grand challenge competition effort described herein presents a novel and unique opportunity to explore advanced tactics for robotic swarms and, more specifically, for countering these saturation attack scenarios.

The Aerial Combat Swarms Swarm vs. Swarm UAV grand challenge competition is designed to inspire new concepts of operations and illuminate new tactics in unmanned systems employment, specifically in the swarm and counter-swarm robotics arenas. The competition scenario involves a tournament of live-fly, large scale “battles,” where in each such battle two teams comprising many autonomous aerial robots vie for air superiority while simultaneously defending a high value unit on the ground (surface) and/or attacking that of the opponent's.

The vision for the inaugural grand challenge event is for 50 vs. 50 UAVs.

Envisioning the inaugural competition includes establishing the associated supporting infrastructure, leveraging extensive experience at the Naval Postgraduate School in facilitating such collaborative, large-scale field experimentation events. The proposed funding supports this first competition instance, with future support proposed on the successes of this pilot initiative, where the proposed option provides for core infrastructure support and equipment to instantiate the inaugural competition.
Consortium for Robotics & Unmanned Systems Education & Research
Office of Naval Research
Navy
2017