Swarm Tactics Tools & Technologies for DARPA's OFFSET Program

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The BBN team is creating a collection of tools and technologies for developing, simulating, and executing tasks with swarms of unmanned systems to enable researchers to create and test their own swarm tactics and supporting technologies.

This website is part of a Swarm Tactics Exchange portal, designed as an online community for swarm tactics developers to share ideas, algorithms, tactics, output, questions, and success stories.

We are conducting regular swarm challenges where we are selecting, integrating, deploying, and evaluating swarm tactics developed from the swarm community.

Interested in participating in the development of swarm tactics and potentially evaluating your work with a live swarm? Contact us here. Also, consider submitting a Sprinter proposal.

About

Developed as part of DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) Program, this project is building a collection of swarm tactics-enabling technologies, including:

A game-based simulation environment for assessing swarm tactics without the need for physical swarm platforms.
A swarm system architecture that facilitates specification and reasoning about swarm behaviors and coordination at the level of team or groups rather than individual platforms.
Tools for swarm tactics development, such as a visual interface for “drag and drop” creation and manipulation of swarm tactics.
Support for cross-language tactics development and other control frameworks (e.g., ROS).
A Swarm Tactician’s Immersive Interaction Interface, enabling a multi-modal (speech and gesture), virtual reality based mechanism for swarm command and control.
A physical swarm testbed consisting of both ground and air platforms for conducting live tactics evaluations.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Technology Office (TTO) is soliciting proposals for OFFSET Swarm Sprinters in order to design swarm tactics and/or other supporting elements. DARPA anticipates multiple calls for proposals over the next several years.