The Potential Civil and Military Uses of UAV Swarms
Several ongoing research projects at the Naval Postgraduate School that involve various levels of cooperative control will be presented. Covering a broad spectrum of applications, all of them make use of relatively high levels of autonomy, relegating human interactions to supervisory roles, allowing the agents to make state-based decisions and form their own flight-plans in situ, for the most part, without the need of human intervention. Included are projects that utilized from 2 to 50 fixed-wing aircraft in simultaneous cooperative flight, and with applications as diverse as perpetual flight of large flocks of autonomously soaring gliders to a grand challenge type event where participating teams engage in Swarm versus Swarm aerial combat competitions with up to 50 aircraft per team.