Research Summaries

Back Fundamental Issues for Observability of Adversarial Swarm Strategies

Fiscal Year 2018
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 This research is a continuation of the project we proposed to ONR last year, to develop fundamental quantitative tools currently lacking for defense against autonomous swarms. In this updated proposal we summarize the work done over the past year. In the rest of the proposal we discuss in detail the motivation and the key insights we have gained into the problem at hand. In the second part of the proposal, a follow-on effort for CY2018 is presented.
Our research approaches the challenges of swarm defense from the outsider's perspective of modeling the effects 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 force and movement, uncertainty propagation due to limited information, efficacy of defensive force application, risk assessment, and intel gathering and observation.
Keywords Autonomy Observability Optimization nonlinear systems swarms
Publications 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
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