Can swarming drones map battles in real time?

FACTS

1) Quadcopters generally only have a range of up to 300 meters from the operator well within small arms range. 

2) Quadcopters with longer ranges of between 2 km to 7 km must emit a considerable EM signal. Thus with decent EW detection can easily find the operator.

3) Their endurance is typically between 8-10 minutes.

4) The longer range quadcopters can have up to 25 minutes endurance. 

5) Any payload will cut into the range and endurance. This is why deliveries via drone simply doesn’t make economic sense. 

6) A swarm of these demand computer control and significance EM emissions that would make it easily detectable allowing for easy destruction within the 7 km max range.

7) Quadcopters are all easily jammed. The Russians with their brute force approach to EW can drop entire swarms from the sky. 

https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2019/08/14/autonomous-robots-could-map-battles-in-real-time/

Can swarming drones map battles in real time?
By: Kelsey D. Atherton

With air and ground robots, DARPA tested autonomous systems built to scout and map an urban environment. (Kelsey D. Atherton / YouTube Screenshot)

Against the gray sky, the black robots hum. The swarm moves without words, mapping the neighborhood below, a flurry of buzzing and plotting, sharp angles and short orbits, creating in real time a blanket of surveillance over the selected objective. Part of DARPA’s OFFSET (OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics) program, the quadcopters are pieces in a greater whole, an incremental step to providing an expansive robot’s-eye view to humans fighting on the ground.

The neighborhood in question for this exercise was an urban warfare training complex at Fort Benning, Georgia, in June 2019. Flying through and over the “Selby Combined Arms Collective Training Facility,” the quadcopters worked with ground robots to identify locations of interest and then create a perimeter around that objective, in a process DARPA likens to “the way a firefighting crew establishes a boundary around a burning building.”

Firefighting looms large in the modern conception of swarm tasks. In January 2019, the Air Force Research Laboratory, together with the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, launched a project for drone swarms to model wildfires, with lessons applicable to military and battlefield uses. Finding danger and plotting a path for humans through it is an ideal task for robots.

In DARPA’s OFFSET exercise, the swarm had to find a mock city hall, an objective inside that building, and then provide situational awareness over the area in runs that lasted 30 minutes. Using commercial off-the-shelf machines and custom software, the program wants to create in real life as close to the kind of real-time tactical information a person might find in a strategy video game.

OFFSET is scheduled to have new exercises and new updates roughly every six months for the next two years, with the June sprint the second in the series. The end goal is for swarms of up to 250 drones to operate autonomously, providing real-time information to humans who can then move through the battlefield confident that the area has at least been robotically scouted and monitored.

As the Pentagon’s blue-sky projects wing, DARPA is focused on advancing the technology to the point where it can be picked up and refined by other labs or industry. Building tactics from the new capabilities, and machines specific to swarm-human teaming, will have to come later. It’s worth looking at the swarms as a possible component of future battlefields, and when designing technologies to meet the needs of the now, keeping an open mind to how swarms might change or hinder those same functions.

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