![]() “OFFSET is developing a variety of swarm-enabling technologies,” said Timothy Chung, the DARPA OFFSET program manager, “from a rich repository of swarm tactics, to virtual environments for swarm simulation, to physical testbeds with real robots where these swarm tactics can be demonstrated in real-world settings.” The program is about four years old, Moore said, and it’s unique in structure because the two swarm system integrators - Northrop Grumman and Raytheon - are creating the testbeds and simulation environments for crafting tactics for large-scale autonomous swarms in urban environments. The test was part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program, which envisions swarms of up to 250 collaborative autonomous systems providing insights to ground troops as they operate in dense metropolitan environments. “We’d never tested anything in an actual physical environment, so proving what we did was huge.” “That was a gate for us to get through,” said Moore, the project manager of the Research and Exploratory Development Department team that ran the test at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state this past August. But ultimately, it navigates the course adeptly, coming within about 10 feet of the buildings and steering around them with relative ease. The wind picks up at points, and the neon-green fixed-wing UAV steadies itself on those occasions. Undeterred, the UAV goes about its task to navigate around buildings at high speeds in an urban environment. Joseph Moore launches a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) into the air and it’s buffeted by the wind. With each second of the video that ticks away, the suspense builds.
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