Joanna Crews
Raytheon‘s BBN Technologies subsidiary will support the Defense Advanced Research Agency‘s Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program through the development of a system for managing small autonomous air and ground vehicles.
The controller technology will feature a visual graphical user designed to produce drone tactics, a game-based tactics simulator and a physical swarm testbed, Raytheon said Monday.
Shane Clark, BBN Technologies’ principal investigator on the program, said the system will help operators control swarming drones through verbal communication and gesture.
Raytheon noted that the system’s programming software and simulation environment can facilitate drone behavior coordination within a group of multiple vehicle types and sensors.
The company demonstrated a swarm of 30 Coyote unmanned aerial vehicles in 2016 through the Office of the Naval Research’s Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology program.
DARPA seeks additional OFFSET program participants to work with BBN Technologies to evaluate and test swarm tactics using a simulation method.
