Research Summaries

Back Fundamental Issues in the Defense Against Autonomous Swarms: Real-Time Defense Strategies for Uncertain Swarms

Fiscal Year 2017
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Investigator(s) Kang, Wei
Kaminer, Isaac I.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary In the last few years, ONR funded research has led to the development of multiple models for simulating swarm behavior, such as those developed by Naomi Leonard at Princeton and Klimka Szwaykowska at NRL; and methods for implementing autonomous swarms, such as the autonomous swarms being flown by Tim Chung at NPS. These projects consider challenges related to autonomous swarms from what could be termed an insider's perspective that is, from the perspective of creating, controlling, and driving one's own autonomous or semi-autonomous swarm. Our research approaches the challenges of swarm defense from the opposite direction from the outsider's perspective of modeling the intention of and guiding the behavior of an enemy swarm. Such interactions are characterized by limited knowledge of the underlying swarm mechanisms, and also limited access to these mechanisms in the form of applying physical force or taking advantage of reactive behaviors. For real-time applications, computational demands and resource limitations often make the pursuit of globally optimal tactical strategies unrealistic. These restrictions necessitate instead the design of balanced strategies: robust, resource efficient strategies, which exceed required performance metrics while retaining computational speed. The construction of such strategies requires the quantification of myriad fundamental features needed for cost/benefit analysis, including but not limited to: attacking swarm capabilities in terms of both size and movement, uncertainty propagation due to limited information, efficacy of defensive force application and intel gathering, and risk assessment. The goal of our ongoing project is to develop these necessary quantitative tools, as well as the theoretical and computational foundation for generating solutions with them and thus to enable the use of informed real-time strategies against large-scale autonomous swarms for defense and operations.
Keywords Autonomy controllability nonlinear optimization swarms
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Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal