Charles River Analytics, a developer of systems solutions, will design, develop and evaluate swarm tactics, primitives and algorithms that support warfighters in urban operations for DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program. A swarm is a conflict based on simultaneous attacks from numerous directions.

Under its Swarm Algorithms and Tactics for Urban Reconnaissance and Isolation (SATURN) effort, Charles River Analytics is developing capabilities to provide heterogeneous swarms of unlimited size with resilient swarm behavior while achieving mission objectives. It is designing the swarm tactics, primitives and algorithms with:

  • Bio-inspired approaches to address scalable communication between swarm vehicles, decentralized task allocation and resilience in austere conditions.
  • A behavior execution engine using the Hap agent framework, which is a reactive agent framework for realistic behavior generation.
  • Real-time object detection and tracking software to facilitate line-of-sight communication for drones in communication-denied environments.
  • Integration of the Unity3D game engine to support demonstrations of swarms working in realistic scenarios.
Conducted in a series of sprints, the goal of the OFFSET program is to develop and demonstrate over 100 operationally relevant swarm tactics that could be used by groups of ground and up to 250 unmanned air systems. Charles River is one of five sprinter teams developing and testing swarm tactics within simulation environments created by integrator teams Raytheon BBN and Northrop Grumman Mission Systems.