OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET)

DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program envisions future small-unit infantry forces using swarms comprising upwards of 250 small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or small unmanned ground systems (UGSs) to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the program seeks to enable rapid development and deployment of breakthrough capabilities.

OFFSET aims to provide the tools to quickly generate swarm tactics, evaluate those swarm tactics for effectiveness, and integrate the best swarm tactics into field operations. To accomplish these goals, OFFSET will develop an active swarm tactics development ecosystem and supporting open systems architecture, including:

• An advanced human-swarm interface to enable users to monitor and direct potentially hundreds of unmanned platforms simultaneously in real time. The program intends to leverage rapidly emerging immersive and intuitive interactive technologies (e.g., augmented and virtual reality, voice-, gesture-, and touch-based) to create a novel command interface with immersive situational awareness and decision presentation capabilities. The interface would also incorporate a swarm interaction grammar, enabling “freestyle” design of swarm tactics that allow dynamic action and reaction based on real-time conditions in the field.
• A real-time, networked virtual environment that would support a physics-based, swarm tactics game. In the game, players would use the interface to rapidly explore, evolve, and evaluate swarm tactics to see which would potentially work best, whether using various unmanned systems in the real world or exploring innovative synthetic technologies in the virtual one. Users could submit swarm tactics and track their performance from test rounds on a leaderboard, to encourage both competition and collaboration.
• A community-driven swarm tactics exchange. This curated, limited access program portal would house tools to help participants design swarm tactics by composing collective behaviors, swarm algorithms, and even other existing tactics. It would provide these key ingredients to an extensible architecture for end-user-generated swarm tactics and help create a lasting community to innovate and cultivate the most effective tactics, with the potential to integrate third-party tactics and future users.

OFFSET is structured to demonstrate its technologies through frequent live experiments with various unmanned air and ground platforms. Roughly every six months, operational vignettes of progressively increasing complexity would challenge both the swarm architecture and the developed swarm tactics across numerous technological and operational test variables, such as swarm size, spatial scale of operations, and mission duration. Users would employ the swarm interface to test the best of the virtual tactics in the real world, and interactively supply their unmanned platforms with near-real-time tactics updates using automated deployment technologies.