News Release

Swarm Strategies
Defense News
February 3, 2003

Simulating Ants' Behavior May Help U.S. Fight Future Wars 

By Gail Kaufman

A small army of carpenter ants boils from their nest, each taking its 
own meandering path toward a pile of bread crumbs and leaving chemical 
pheromones in its tracks. The ant that takes the shortest route returns 
first, and the rest of the colony follows its double-tracked pheromone 
trail to the food.  

Some Pentagon researchers believe this type of naturally occurring 
phenomenon, in which a decentralized group achieves a common goal, 
may guide the armed forces of the future.  

Several labs are working on ways to model the behavior of swarms, 
whether of ants, unmanned aerial vehicles or even infantry soldiers.  

"Swarm intelligence is a shift in mindset: from centralized control 
to decentralized control and distributed intelligence; from predefined 
solutions that may break down with the first glitch - to emergent, self-
organizing strategies and tactics," said Eric Bonabeau, chief scientist 
for Icosystem Corp.  

The Cambridge, Mass., firm recently was hired by the U.S. Air Force 
Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Office of Naval Research to 
support several studies by modeling and simulating swarms.  

Metal Swarms 

Air Force lab officials want to know whether groups of cheap 
yet intelligent UAVs might someday take on roles far beyond 
the capabilities of today's aircraft.  

Like the ants, a man-made swarm might be able to find and destroy 
moving targets with little, if any, outside guidance; or it might 
create a diversion, allowing friendly troops to move undetected 
past an enemy tank platoon or anti-aircraft battery. The swarm 
might even prove effective at controlling mobs.  

Consider the typical human response when hordes of yellow jackets 
arrive at a picnic table, an AFRL engineer told a UAV conference 
last summer.  

"It is really one nonlethal way of crowd control," said Bruce Clough, 
a technical expert for control automation. "Naturally, a human psyche 
gets scared by swarms."  

Icosystem, at the military's bidding, created a computer program that 
modeled a notional swarm of up to 110 UAVs. Like ants and their 
pheromones, the simulated UAVs emitted signals to tell the rest of 
the swarm about conditions in their immediate vicinity.  

AFRL researchers used the program to test various theories and 
techniques. How much outside information does a swarm need to 
find a target? How many individual elements does it take to cover 
a square mile, or 100 square miles? How well does swarming work vs.
traditional command-and-control approaches? Company officials now 
are quantifying those results and shopping those ideas to three 
major defense and aerospace firms to commercialize them.  

The results, while encouraging, also carried a warning about 
autonomous behavior.  

"Obviously, we have to make sure that the UAVs don't self-organize 
into some dangerous, pathological configuration," Bona-beau said. 
"We have to be able to trust them because their collective behavior 
is not predefined. That is the goal of current research."  

The operator-UAV ratio - it currently takes several operators 
to fly a single UAV - must be reduced as well, Bonabeau said.  

Ground Swarms

Other military branches are trying to learn how they might apply 
swarm techniques to their own troops' actions. For example, a system 
of decentralized action might help soldiers operate better in urban 
areas, where enemies can easily disappear among crowds or in buildings.  

Navy researchers and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's 
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are building computer models and 
algorithms to find ways that multiple air and ground vehicles might 
find and trap an enemy in highly populated environments.  

Similar techniques also might be used to deceive an enemy: What 
looks like a minor skirmish might actually be a concerted attack.  

Awareness of the possibilities of the swarm also may keep U.S. forces 
from enduring another disaster like the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, in 
which Army forces were overwhelmed by a mixture of gangs, guerillas, 
and heretofore peaceful residents.  

Although this type of research is in the early stages, the swarm 
intelligence concept is gaining momentum throughout the Defense 
Department. A recent study conducted by Project Alpha, an in-house 
think-tank at U.S. Joint Force's Command, embraced Bonabeau's 
ideas. Last year, the office gave Pentagon leaders a slew of 
recommendations to strengthen swarm intelligence research.  

"We're hoping to do a whole sequence of [swarm-related] projects, 
including a live demonstration," said Gary Trinkle, team lead for 
Project Alpha's study, "Swarming Entities - The Operational Utilities 
of Establishing Humans-on-the-Loop."  

As futuristic as data-linked UAVs may be, the concepts that drive the 
swarm are thousands of years old. Ask Project Alpha's historians, and 
they'll tell you that the Parthians used them to win the Battle of 
Carrhae in 53 B.C., routing the rigid Roman army with surprise cavalry 
counterattacks.  

                            -==-

Source: Icosystem - http://icosystem.com/releases/DefenseNews_03022003.htm


Cheers, Steve..

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