Demonstration of Effects-Based Operations Using Fully Autonomous Heterogeneous Vehicle Swarms

Effects-based operations have been demonstrated on hardware to realize practical and autonomously performed behaviors utilizing a variety of vehicle platforms including ground, water surface, and aerial vehicles. The heterogeneous vehicle swarms enact a variety of cooperative behaviors autonomously, using reactive, effects-based algorithms and broadcast-only, decentralized communications. Control is achieved through the use of stigmergic potential fields, a form of cooperative motor schema behavior based upon mathematical functions that are associated with entities in the operational environment of the vehicle. The video demonstration shows footage from actual hardware tests that have demonstrated empirically how reactive swarming behaviors using stigmergic potential fields can offer robustly sufficient behavior with improved total system survivability and total operational effectiveness, particularly under dynamic environmental and operational conditions.