The Swarming Project - Coordination and Guidance of Unmanned Swarms

Abstract

Rapid acquisition of situation awareness and the execution of complex, multi domain missions are critical in disaster response operations. The Swarming project, a research effort at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), addresses this challenge, where a fleet of heterogeneous unmanned aircraft and ground systems operated in swarms provide critical information from a disaster site in real-time. The swarms are coordinated in a task-based manner from one central ground control station. Furthermore, a manned helicopter serves as a mothership for unmanned aircraft that can be dropped in flight and autonomously integrated into a swarm. This paper describes the components that were developed, integrated into a system-of-systems and demonstrated within the scope of a simulation campaign using a multi-agent simulation system. An outlook on the next steps for further exploitation of the Swarming platform is given.