DARPA: Robust Semi-Autonomous Swarm Tactics for Situational Awareness in Uncertain Environments

A team of four University of Maryland researchers has been awarded a nine-month, $646K cooperative agreement from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for “Robust Semi-Autonomous Swarm Tactics for Situational Awareness in Uncertain Environments.” Assistant Professor Huan Xu (AE/ISR) is the principal investigator. The team also includes Assistant Professor Michael Otte(AE); Dinesh Manocha (CS/ECE/UMIACS), who will soon join the university as the Paul Chrisman Iribe Chair of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Ming Lin (CS/UMIACS), the Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science.

The Maryland researchers will combine multiple existing autonomous surveillance strategies into a single framework, enabling simultaneous overlapping deployment in different subsets of the environment. They will produce a set of semi-autonomous aerial swarm tactics that can be used simultaneously in different parts of the environment and will account for uncertainties, sensor errors and dynamic obstacles. The goal is to develop and evaluate new swarm simulation algorithms that can automatically adapt to the complexity of urban environments.