Service Academies Swarm Challenge: Expanding the capabilities UAV swarms

and what they are not yet able to do.”

“I’m incredibly proud of the Cadets and the Midshipmen who have put so many hours into this Challenge,” said acting DARPA Director Steven Walker. “To my knowledge, this is the first time we’ve flown swarm against swarm at this scale. And the creativity these students showed in their design of offensive and defensive tactics bodes well for our Services’ future capabilities.”

DARPA often does a Challenge event instead of a standard research program when the Agency knows a field of technological innovation is ripe for fast progress but would benefit from incentives to get participation from the broader research or Service community. For the Service Academies Swarm Challenge, DARPA invited the young officers-in-training to develop and flight test novel ideas for how best to use swarms in future wars.

That goal is especially relevant today in light of the trend in military operations to maximize human-machine cooperation, whether the machines are UAVs, unmanned undersea vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles, or even satellites, said Brad Tousley, director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, which oversaw the competition. The Service Academies Swarm Challenge focused the students on the fact that in the future—when these capabilities are in real military systems—they may have the opportunity to use swarms of much larger numbers of unmanned entities.

“One of DARPA’s jobs is to make sure that every fight we go into is an unfair fight in our favor,” Tousley said. “That means ensuring that these Midshipmen and Cadets as future officers can use unmanned systems in a swarm configuration more effectively than their adversarial counterparts.”

Gameplay
The Service academies tested their tactics in a modified version of Capture the Flag. Two teams at a time played inside the Battle Cube, a cubic airspace 500 meters on a side, 78 meters above the ground. Each team was given 20 fixed-wing UAVs and 20 quad-rotor UAVs and, under the rules of play, could field a mixed fleet of up to 25 UAVs for each of two 30-minute battle rounds. Each team had to protect its “flag” (a large, inflatable ground target) while trying to score the most points before time ran out.

Teams had three ways to score points: air-to-air “tags” that used simulated (virtual) weapons and sensors to fire on an opponent’s UAV in flight; air-to-ground “tags” earned by physically landing a UAV on the opponent’s flag; and accomplishments in swarm logistics by