Listen to the article
The U.S. military wants to make it easy for troops to direct swarms of drones—on land, at sea, or in the air—and is offering vendors up to $100 million to do so.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit announced the Orchestrator Prize Challenge, the latest sign that the military is looking beyond simply buying warbots in bulk toward the larger challenge of giving commanders a way to command groups of different drones from different makers.
“We want orchestrator technologies that allow humans to work the way they already command–through plain language that expresses desired effects, constraints, timing, and priorities—not by clicking through menus or programming behaviors,” said Lt. Gen. Frank Donovan, who leads the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group. The DAWG, essentially a re-branding of the Replicator initiative, is running the challenge along with DIU and the Navy.
Replicator sought to procure thousands of small, highly autonomous drones quickly but missed a key August goal for delivery. (The bar is set by Ukraine, which last year sent more than a million drones to its frontline units.)
The Pentagon has been hacking away at bureaucratic obstacles that prevent the fast acquisition of drones, but the larger problem is how to make them actually useful to commanders who can’t spare troops to operate one drone at a time, as Ukrainian units do.
Hence the Ender’s Game-like “Orchestrator” challenge, to find a “robust, scalable and vehicle-agnostic capability for understanding, tasking and coordinating autonomous systems at the fleet level.”
The concept of swarm robotics goes back more than 30 years, to this 1995 paper. The Pentagon has been holding multiple-robot challenges, like the Navy’s SWARM and LOCUST events, for more than a decade. But SWARM used about a dozen autonomous boats in very simple naval maneuvers, while LOCUST employed choreographed maneuvers.
The challenge now is to integrate multiple drones capable of autonomous decision-making and to subordinate them to a human, or at least to human judgment (which is a closer reading of the actual Defense Department policy on lethal autonomous weapons).
The end result may be the real test of how well humans and robotic swarms really understand each other.
Read the full article here
11 Comments
The $100 million challenge is a significant investment, and I hope it will yield innovative solutions that can be applied not just in military contexts but also in civilian areas such as search and rescue or environmental monitoring.
The Defense Department’s policy on lethal autonomous weapons emphasizes the importance of human judgment, and I’m interested to see how the Orchestrator challenge will address this requirement in the context of drone swarms.
Lt. Gen. Frank Donovan’s statement about wanting orchestrator technologies that allow humans to work through plain language highlights the importance of user-friendly interfaces in commanding drone swarms effectively.
This is a crucial aspect, as it will enable commanders to focus on strategic decisions rather than getting bogged down in technical details.
I’m curious to know more about the Orchestrator Prize Challenge and how it will address the issue of integrating multiple drones capable of autonomous decision-making and subordinating them to human judgment.
The concept of swarm robotics has been around for over 30 years, and it’s interesting to see how the Pentagon is building on this idea with the Orchestrator challenge to find a robust and scalable capability for understanding and coordinating autonomous systems.
I’m concerned about the potential risks and unintended consequences of deploying autonomous drone swarms, and I hope the Pentagon is carefully considering these factors in their development and testing.
The fact that Ukraine was able to send over a million drones to its frontline units last year sets a high bar for the US military, and I’m skeptical about whether they can achieve similar success with their drone swarm initiatives.
The Pentagon’s goal to make it easy for troops to direct swarms of drones with a $100 million challenge is ambitious, but I wonder if they can achieve this given the missed August goal for delivery of small autonomous drones in the Replicator initiative.
The challenge now is not just about the technology, but also about overcoming bureaucratic obstacles that have hindered the fast acquisition of drones in the past.
The Navy’s SWARM and LOCUST events have demonstrated the potential of swarm robotics in naval maneuvers, but the challenge now is to apply this technology in more complex and dynamic environments.