Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) have just released a study showing that a single person should be able to command 100 or more drones alone.
The study, published in Field Robotics, shows how a person can supervise autonomous ground and air robots without subjecting the individual to an excessive workload.
According to Oregon State University, the findings represent an important step in the effective and economical use of bee colonies in a variety of roles, from wilderness firefighting to package delivery to disaster response in urban settings.
We haven't seen a lot of delivery drones in the U.S., but some companies have deployed them in other countries," said Julie A. of Oregon State University's College of EngineeringAdams) said.
It makes business sense to deploy delivery drones on a large scale, but it requires one person to be responsible for a large number of these drones. I'm not saying that our work is a final solution that shows that everything is working properly, but this is the first step to getting additional data to facilitate this kind of system," she added.
Oregon State University's research stems from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) offensive swarm tactics program, for which the lead research team was awarded an OFFSET grant in 2017. For this reason, there is no doubt that militarization will also be on the cards.
Over a four-year period of deployment, researchers deployed up to 250 autonomous vehicles (multi-rotor aerial drones and ground rovers) to collect information in urban areas where buildings impair sightlines and satellite communications.
Oregon State University reports that the swarms are also being used at military city training grounds to gather information that has the potential to improve the safety of U.S. teams and civilians.
This project requires the adoption of off-the-shelf technology and the establishment of the necessary autonomy to be deployed by a person called a swarm commander," said Adams, associate director of deployment systems and policy at the Institute for Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems at Oregon State University.
This work requires the development of not only the required systems and software, but also the user interface of the swarm commander to allow one person to deploy these ground and air systems," she added.
Intelligent Flow Technologies helped develop a virtual reality interface called i3, which allows commanders to control swarms in advanced directions.
"The commander didn't drive every vehicle himself, because if you deploy that many vehicles, they can't do it — one person can't do it," Adams said.
The idea is that the swarm commander can choose which game to perform and can make minor adjustments to it like a quarterback in the NFL. Objective data from trained swarm commanders suggest that one can deploy these systems in a built environment, which has a very wide range of implications beyond this project," she added.
The study was conducted at several Joint Armed Forces Collective Training Facilities of the Ministry of Defence. During each multi-day field exercise, swarm commanders update their workload and stress levels every 10 minutes as more vehicles are introduced.
During the final field exercises, more than 100 vehicles were used to assess the level of workload of the commanders. Oregon State University reports that physiological sensors feed information into an algorithm that estimates the workload based on sensory channel levels and overall workload.
"It is true that the workload estimates of the swarm commander often exceed the overload threshold, but with only a few minutes at a time, the commander was able to successfully complete the task, often in challenging temperature and wind conditions," Adams said.
You can see the study for yourself in Field Robotics magazine.