DARPA has announced that during the second field experiment for its OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program, teams of autonomous air and ground robots tested tactics on a mission to isolate an urban objective.

During the experiment, which took place in June at the Selby Combined Arms Collective Training Facility in Fort Benning, Georgia, the robots started off by identifying locations of interest, and then created a perimeter around the focal point, similarly to how a firefighting crew establishes a boundary around a burning building.

According to DARPA, OFFSET sees a day where large swarms of collaborative autonomous systems will provide important insights to small ground military units in urban areas where communications and mobility are constrained by vertical structures, tight spaces, and limited sight lines.

The program includes several “sprint” efforts, which focus on various elements of the command, control, and collaboration among large numbers of vehicles and humans.

“The pace of our scheduled experiments requires our performers to take risks” says Timothy Chung, the OFFSET program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office.

“Rapid integration demands that our swarm teams, both integrators and sprinters, develop smarter ways to improve their current processes.”

During the experiment, teams tackled a complex scenario that covered two city blocks. Some of the tasks included locating and isolating a mock city hall building, locating and securing an objective inside, and then securing the building. All of these tasks had to be completed while maintaining situational awareness of the surrounding area, and runs lasted up to 30 minutes each, DARPA notes.

OFFSET includes two main performer types: Swarm System Integrators and Swarm Sprinters. The Swarm System Integrators—Northrop Grumman and Raytheon BBN—create OFFSET architectures, interfaces, and their respective Swarm Tactics Exchanges, which is the location of tools that help performers design swarm tactics by composing collective behaviors, swarm algorithms, and existing swarm tactics.

Meanwhile, the Swarm Sprinters perform focused tasks and deliver extra technologies to merge with system integrators.

During the June experiment, the integrators and second set of Swarm Sprinters were brought together to integrate and test swarm autonomy tactics and technologies. This included Heron, Michigan Tech Research Institute, the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and Cornell University.

The June experiment highlighted the benefits of “continuous agile development and integration and deployment,” which is of vital importance to the OFFSET program. DARPA says that the Swarm System Integrators “showed maturation in field operations,” while the Swarm Sprinters “contributed technologies to enhance system performance.” DARPA notes that the platform experimentation provided insights into the role of commercial-off-the-shelf technologies in a research and development program.

The field experiment conducted in June was the second of six scheduled tests. More field experiments are targeted at intervals approximately six months apart.