OFFSET seeks proposals to accelerate swarm tactics

DARPA is soliciting creative proposals for the fourth swarmsprint in its OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program. OFFSETenvisions swarms of 250 collaborative autonomous systems providing criticalcapabilities to ground units in urban areas where challenges such as tallbuildings, tight spaces and limited sight lines constrain essential communications,sensing, maneuverability, and autonomous operations.

The swarm sprints aim to encourage rapid innovation andcontinuous incorporation of breakthrough technologies. Each of the five coresprints emphasizes one of the key OFFSET thrust areas – swarm tactics, swarmautonomy, human-swarm teaming, virtual environment and physical testbed – toultimately enable cross-cutting breakthroughs in swarm systems capabilities.

The fourth swarm sprint consists of two topics areas:developing synthetic technologies in the OFFSET virtual environments andidentifying applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to discover and learnnovel swarm tactics.

For the first topic area, proposers will seek to develop andimplement synthetic capabilities in simulation, representing potential futuretechnologies, such as distributed “see-through-wall” sensors, passive swarmcommunications, or enhanced sensor/computing arrays, to enable and demonstratenovel swarm tactics. Proposed technologies could be near-term advances that arebeing prototyped in laboratories or far-term ideas that are primarilyconceptual but physically grounded.

The second topic area represents an ad hoc sprint forleveraging artificial Intelligence for accelerating swarm tactics design, forwhich sprinters will discover, learn, and harden novel swarm tactics byapplying artificial intelligence frameworks via enhancements of the OFFSETvirtual environments.

"With OFFSET, we are expanding the tactics available towarfighters, leveraging advances in autonomous systems to address complexchallenges in urban environments," says Timothy Chung, program manager inDARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO). “Exploring and developing swarmtechnologies in virtual environments today can yield insights and impact forreal-world breakthrough capabilities tomorrow.”

DARPA also has awarded separate contracts for the thirdswarm sprint to Carnegie Mellon University and Soar Technology Inc., each ofwhich will focus on development of advanced swarm tactics.

The third swarm sprint aims to augment the growingcollection of swarm tactics in the OFFSET ecosystem, employing heterogeneousswarms of air and ground robots, and also to explore innovative technologies toenhance human-swarm teaming or how humans interact with autonomous swarms.