Northrop Grumman takes part in DARPA swarm test

Northrop Grumman has detailed its participation in DARPA’s second unmanned vehicle (UxV) swarming field experiment.

The experiment leveraged the command, control and collaboration capabilities of the Rapid Integration Swarm Ecosystem (RISE) in a mock city environment at Fort Benning, Georgia, with multiple UxVs and human team members.

The test was part of Northrop Grumman’s work as a Swarm Systems Integrator in the Agency’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) programme, which seeks to provide dismounted soldiers with upwards of 250 small UxVs.

Northrop Grumman showcased its open architecture by integrating various capabilities from associate Swarm Sprinters contractors into RISE, including Intelligent Automation and the University of Central Florida. RISE also demonstrated self-healing task allocation in the event of loss of communications, via capabilities provided by Heron Systems, an associate contractor.

RISE utilizes the Robot Operating System (ROS), an open architecture that enables the use of small, low-cost commercial off-the-shelf air and ground vehicles. These vehicles rely on the human-swarm teaming approach that enables swarm commanders to define a high level mission plan, monitor the mission, and make decisions based on that new system-sourced information.

RISE also enables third party developers to easily interact with existing platforms, sensors and effectors through the use of standard ROS interactions.