“One knows all and all know one,” said Parish, long an innovator in drone technology, of how the pilotless aircraft would operate together. “It is the equivalent of the Borg.”
Though he is referring to the autonomous collective from the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Parish’s vision is not science fiction. It’s a capability being sought by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s science development unit formed after the Russians launched Sputnik.
DARPA last week put out a call for people with ideas for “revolutionary approaches to unmanned aircraft systems autonomy” to contribute in its Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment, or CODE program, according to the announcement.
The object is to increase the capability and flexibility of military drones while reducing the cost of operation. DARPA’s outreach effort comes at a time when Congress and the Pentagon are re-evaluating the U.S. military’s technologic capabilities.
“Enemies and potential competitors are working every day to exploit vulnerabilities in our capabilities, U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a news release Tuesday. “That includes developing technologies to offset areas of American military strength.”
The committee is holding a hearing Wednesday morning on ways to improve the Pentagon’s ability to respond to the pace of technological change.
For DARPA, improving drone technology is critical. The U.S. military, according to the trade group Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, has invested nearly $20 billion for a projected 8,266 drones, ranging from Global Hawks, Predators and Reapers to smaller devices like WASPs, PUMAs and RAVENs that can be launched by hand. But while those systems have performed very well providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as lethal strikes against al-Qaida, the Taliban, Islamic State and other current adversaries, DARPA said that “most of the current inventory is not well-matched” against more technologically advanced enemies who present “higher levels of threats, contested electromagnetic spectrum and re-locatable targets.”
So DARPA is looking for a relatively inexpensive way to improve the odds.
“Just as wolves hunt in coordinated packs with minimal communication, multiple CODE-enabled unmanned aircraft would collaborate to find, track, identify and engage targets, all under the command of a single human mission supervisor,” said Jean-Charles Ledé, DARPA program manager, on the agency’s website.
Parish said he developed similar technology five years ago and plans on applying to DARPA for a chance to share his ideas for the CODE program.
“Five years ago I was a mentor in the DARPA project to demonstrate new autonomous command communication events in multiple transmitting devices, with intuitive intelligence,” he said. “It was a successful project.”
In 2012, Parish said he addressed a military conference on the concept of “intuitive intelligence for drones acting on a common goal with autonomous command and control in real time.”
In simple terms, Parish said that his technology allows the drones to communicate with each other without having to ping back and forth with a centralized system. This “hubless” technology has other applications as well, he said, for instance enabling cell phones to communicate with each other without the need for cell phone towers.
“Each drone shares real-time knowledge from its sensors and position with the others in a swarm and the swarm acts as a single thinking machine while still composed of multiple drones,” said Parish. ”Humans act on intuition in decision making, Drones act with implanted intuitive algorithms that give them goals and process, in this instance, CODE hunting algorithms”
The communications system, said Parish, would mesh with existing intuitive intelligence technology to allow the drones to work as a team, instead of each one relying on a separate pilot, sensor operator and support unit.
Drones, which currently are flown individually, “are operated by large crews,” according to the DARPA announcement. “This is expensive and incompatible with an organic system able to react quickly to a dynamic situation,” according to DARPA.
The crews include a ground control station, pilot, sensor operators, intelligence operators and those who help launch, recover and maintain the drones. McClatchy News has reported that it takes up to 170 people to keep a Predator drone flying for 24 hours and about 300 to operate a Global Hawk.
The CODE program is geared to coping with a future where drones are more vulnerable to enemy attack by transforming their operations. Instead of multiple people to operate each one, DARPA would like to see one person able to command and control six or more unmanned vehicles simultaneously.
It is akin to “flooding the zone” in football, where a defender has to cope with several offensive players instead of just one, with the hope that he is overwhelmed.
“Commanders could mix and match different systems with specific capabilities that suit individual missions instead of depending on a single UAS that integrates all needed capabilities but whose loss would be potentially catastrophic,” DARPA says. “This flexibility could significantly increase the mission- and cost-effectiveness of legacy assets as well as reduce the development times and costs of future systems.”
There are several potential military and civilian applications, says Parish.
Providing more indepth, three-dimensional images for warfighters, drone countermeasures and defeating air defenses are among some of the military applications, said Parish, while farming, tracking oil spills, natural disaster relief efforts, wildlife protection and even news gathering are among some of the civilian applications, Parish said.
But just because DARPA wants the flexibility of autonomous operation doesn’t mean there will be fleets of drones flying around shooting Hellfire missiles on their own, said Parish.
“The U.S. military has never been comfortable with totally autonomous vehicles,” he said.
In November 2012, the Pentagon issued Directive 3000.09 — Autonomy in Weapon Systems.
“Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force,” according to the directive.
DARPA said its goals for the program, which is in its first phase, are to develop and demonstrate the value of collaborative autonomy, transition that capability to the troops and expand the missions. DARPA will hold two meetings, March 2 and March 6, in the Arlington, Virginia, area for those with concepts that can be used with existing or new drones. But because of time and space constraints, DARPA wants to limit the number of participants to two people per organization with a relevant technological background who are U.S. citizens working for U.S. entities.
©2015 the Tampa Tribune (Tampa, Fla.)
