DSOARS: a swarm engineering and verification environment

John A. Sauter; Kellen Bixler

doi:10.1117/12.2518127

13 May 2019 DSOARS: a swarm engineering and verification environment

John A. Sauter, Kellen Bixler

Proceedings Volume 11021, Unmanned Systems Technology XXI; 110210N (2019) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2518127
Event: SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, 2019, Baltimore, MD, United States

Abstract

Advances in unmanned systems enable smaller, less expensive platforms that can be deployed in high numbers or swarms providing superior intelligence and overwhelming effects over a widely dispersed battlefield greatly multiplying their effectiveness. But swarming system remain a laboratory curiosity with only a few live demonstrations of limited scope. Swarms are complex and their behavior is difficult to predict requiring skilled engineers and hand-tuning for each mission. Based on 20 years of experience designing swarms for military missions, the Design of Self-Organizing Adaptive Robotic Swarms (DSOARS) is an engineering environment which addresses the three core challenges of swarm design: (1) decomposing mission tasks into the behaviors of the swarm entities, (2) configuring the size of the swarm to a specific mission, and (3) verifying that the resulting swarm behavior consistently achieves the mission goals with a high level of confidence. DSOARS addresses these challenges through two primary innovations: (1) a means to create verified swarm design patterns that decompose high level mission tasks into individual behaviors and (2) a constructive test environment that simultaneously optimizes and characterizes the swarm performance against a range of possible mission conditions. Users with no swarm expertise can specify the requirements and constraints of their mission and DSOARS will configure a swarm that can meet those objectives with performance guarantees. This paper describes the approach and reports experimental results building and configuring a suite of swarm tactics for an urban mission.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

John A. Sauter and Kellen Bixler "DSOARS: a swarm engineering and verification environment", Proc. SPIE 11021, Unmanned Systems Technology XXI, 110210N (13 May 2019); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2518127

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