Urban areas continue to be a thorn in the US Army's side as troop movement and communications are often impeded by narrow streets and tall buildings. Ground troops have been utilizing single drones for years, but DARPA wants to mitigate these disadvantages by using a swarm of flying drones instead. This will allow troops to have more eyes in the sky and better guns during combat or recon operations.
However, the military currently has no means or methods for controlling a swarm of drones, so DARPA decided to launch a new program that will help develop tactics and drone wrangling tech needed to assist soldiers operating in urban areas, as well as, let the gamers test everything out. DARPA plans to study the strategies used by gamers when operating these drones to help them have a better understanding of how to maneuver better in urban environments.
The program is called OFFSET, which is short for Offense Swarm-Enabled Tactics, that comes up with at least a hundred tactics to be used by systems of more than a hundred unmanned ground and flying drones. The most important aspect of this program will be trying to come up with a usable interface. Researchers have already considered using both augmented and virtual reality programs along with gesture and voice commands.
DARPA is currently looking for at least 175 registrants for their OFFSET program and registration will be free of charge. According to Maxim, interested participants will have at least six weeks to sign up before registrations are closed.
According to a press release from DARPA, the OFFSET program will be making a "physics-based swarm tactics game" to help develop operational maneuvers and tactics. The network game will look a whole lot like a competitive platform where users can explore various strategies and methods that they can submit to the leaderboards for some bragging rights.
DARPA also wants to encourage players to interact with one another and share their strategies to help build an active community of testers so they can collect algorithms and behaviors for the best possible techniques to control a swarm of drones. Timothy Chung, the program manager of DARPA, hopes to bring about some "new, scalable dynamics to the battlefield" through the OFFSET program.
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