DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program deployed swarms of autonomous air and ground vehicles to demonstrate a raid in an urban area during the agency's third field experiment.

According to DARPA, OFFSET sees a day where swarms of up to 250 collaborative autonomous systems will provide important insights to small ground units in urban areas where limited sight lines and tight spaces can obscure hazards, as well as constrain mobility and communications.

To conduct the DARPA-designed mission, which sought multiple simulated items of interest located in the buildings at the Combined Arms Collective Training Facility (CACTF) at the Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi, Swarm Systems Integrator teams deployed their assets in the air, as well as on the ground, in an interactive urban raid scenario.

“It has been fascinating to watch the Swarm Sprinters, who may not have been previously exposed to realistic operational settings, begin to understand why it’s so difficult to operate in dense, urban environments,” says Timothy Chung, the OFFSET program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO).

“The Swarm Sprinters brought a number of novel technologies they have developed over the last 6-9 months and successfully integrated and tested their developments on physical platforms in real-world environments, which was exciting to see.”

The initial phase of the OFFSET swarm’s mission is to collect intelligence about the urban area of operations. During the field experiment scenario, AprilTags, which is a type of 2D bar code often used in robotics, were placed on and in buildings and throughout the urban environment to represent items of interest that need to be investigated further and/or hazards to avoid or render safe.

As the swarm relayed information acquired from the tags, human swarm tacticians adaptively utilized a number of swarm tactics their teams had developed to isolate and secure the building(s) containing the identified items. At the same time, separate subswarms also were routinely tasked to maintain situational awareness and continue observation of the surrounding environment. According to DARPA, the complex scenario is designed to “inspire and incentivize such dynamic employment of large-scale heterogeneous robotic teams to carry out these diverse tasks.”

Two main performer types— Swarm Systems Integrators and Swarm Sprinters—make up OFFSET. OFFSET architectures, interfaces, and their respective Swarm Tactics Exchanges—which house tools to help performers design tactics by composing collective behaviors, algorithms, and existing swarm tactics—are created by the integrators, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon BBN. The sprinters perform focused tasks and deliver additional technologies to merge with system integrators.

During the Camp Shelby experiment, Swarm Sprinters Charles River Analytics, Inc., Case Western University, and Northwestern University showcased the ability to integrate novel interactions and interface modalities for enhanced human-swarm teaming. This allows the human operator to direct the swarm using interactions such as gestures or haptic touch. The developments of Carnegie Mellon University and Soar Technology were incorporated in operational swarm tactics, such as providing the swarm the capability to search and map a building or automate resource allocation.