We are Legion: One person ‘swarm commander’ can now control 100 drones

“We don’t see a lot of delivery drones yet in the United States, but there are companies that have been deploying them in other countries,” said Julie A. Adams of the OSU College of Engineering.

“It makes business sense to deploy delivery drones at a scale, but it will require a single person to be responsible for very large numbers of these drones. I’m not saying our work is a final solution that shows everything is OK, but it is the first step toward getting additional data [to] facilitate that kind of a system,” she added.

The OSU study grew from the Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), for which the lead research team received an OFFSET grant in 2017. For this reason, no doubt militarization would also be on the cards.

Fancy being a “swarm commander?”

Conducted over four years, researchers deployed swarms of up to 250 autonomous vehicles (multi-rotor aerial drones and ground rovers) to gather information in urban areas where buildings impair line-of-sight and satellite-based communication.

These swarms, OSU reports, have also been used in military urban training sites to collect information that has the potential to enhance the safety of U.S. troops and civilians.

“The project required taking off-the-shelf technologies and building the autonomy needed for them to be deployed by a single human called the swarm commander,” said Adams, the associate director for deployed systems and policy at OSU’s collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute.

“That work also required developing not just the needed systems and the software but also the user interface for that swarm commander to allow a single human to deploy these ground and aerial systems.”,” she added.

Smart Information Flow Technologies helped develop a virtual reality interface called I3, which allows the commander to control the swarm with high-level directions.

We are Legion

“The commanders weren’t physically driving each individual vehicle because if you’re deploying that many vehicles, they can’t – a single human can’t do that,” Adams said.

“The idea is that the swarm commander can select a play to be executed and can make minor adjustments to it like a quarterback would in the NFL. The objective data from the trained swarm commanders demonstrated that a single human can deploy these systems in built environments, which has very broad implications beyond this project,” she added.

The study was conducted at the Multiple Department of Defense Combined Armed Collective Training Facilities. Swarm commanders updated their workload and stress levels every 10 minutes during each multiday field exercise as additional vehicles were introduced.

Over 100 vehicles were used to assess the commanders’ workload levels during the final field exercise. Physiological sensors fed information into an algorithm that estimated workload based on sensory channel levels and overall workload, OSU reports.

“The swarm commanders’ workload estimate did cross the overload threshold frequently, but just for a few minutes at a time, and the commander was able to successfully complete the missions, often under challenging temperature and wind conditions,” Adams said.

You can view the study for yourself in the journal Field Robotics.