50 vs. 50 by 2015: Swarm vs. Swarm UAV Live-Fly Competition at the Naval Postgraduate School

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Authors
Chung, Timothy H.
Jones, Kevin D.
Day, Michael A.
Jones, Marianna
Clement, Michael
Subjects
Advisors
Date of Issue
2013
Date
2013
Publisher
Curran Associates, Inc.
Language
Abstract
Aerial Combat Swarms is a swarm vs. swarm UA V live-fly competition, designed to inspire new concepts of operations and illuminate new tactics in unmanned systems employment, specifically in the swarm and counter-swarm robotics arenas. The competition scenario involves a tournament of "battles" where in each such battle two teams comprising many autonomous aerial robots vie for air superiority while simultaneously defending a high value unit on the ground and/or attacking that of the opponent's. The vision for the inaugural grand challenge event is for SO vs. SO UAVs by the year 2015. The Aerial Combat Swarms competition further serves as an innovation testbed, providing the infrastructure and open architecture interface definitions for hardware/software/network connections between UAVs, ground command stations, observers, and the "Arbiter," which serves as an "autonomous referee." An additional element includes specifications for operating in a virtual battle arena for modeling and simulation experiments and hardware-in-the-Ioop flight validation. The overarching open design enables participants to leverage existing technologies available from the Aerial Combat Swarms open source community. The ambitious grand challenge competition effort described in this paper presents a novel and unique opportunity to explore advanced tactics for robotic swarms. Perhaps more increasingly and operationally relevant, this competition actively accelerates future concepts for also engaging and defeating adversarial unmanned systems.
Type
Article
Description
Series/Report No
Department
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Information Sciences
Organization
Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funder
Format
29 p.
Citation
Chung, T.H., Jones, K.D., Day, M.A., Jones, M., and Clement, M. "50 VS. 50 by 2015: Swarm Vs. Swarm UAV Live-Fly Competition at the Naval Postgraduate School." AUVSI North America, Washington, D.C. (2013): 1792-1811.
Distribution Statement
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.
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