Jane Edwards
Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Technologies plan to participate in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency exercise that seeks to demonstrate how a single user can operate a swarm of about 200 unmanned systems in urban areas, C4ISRNET reported Monday.
The exercise will be held in November at Fort Campbell in Kentucky as part of DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program.
Northrop intends to test its open architecture system – Rapid Integration Swarm Ecosystem – that enables the user to control about 200 vehicles to carry out a specific task by drawing a sketch on a tablet. Erin Cherry, the company’s senior technical program manager of emerging capabilities development, called the approach the “swarm grammar.”
“Honestly, the sky is the limit here. On OFFSET, we’ve really tried to be as broad as we can,” Cherry said of Northrop’s swarming tech program.
Northrop plans to transition its swarming technology to the U.S. Army once its contract with DARPA expires in March. Cherry said the company believes its platform could be used with the service’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System and other programs.
