Animals swarms in nature are providing insight into U.S. military development of drone swarms operating outside of a centralized command system. War on the Rocks writes, “now imagine being able to deploy a collection of drones on the scale and magnitude of a locust swarm. Indeed, the same laws that govern natural swarms could govern collective masses of cheap robotic systems. Today, efforts are underway to develop commercial swarms for crop pollination, surveillance, and high-resolution weather monitoring. However, to date, developers largely centralize the management of their robotic swarms.” Research has suggested that decentralized swarms, however, by avoiding a “single point of vulnerability,” would likely be more resilient in military operations scenarios. The essential idea of drone swarms is that “each drone must be able to execute the fundamental characteristic of the entire swarm, which is to independently coordinate its own decisions to produce behaviors to support a collective aim….therefore, to effectively employ drones as a swarm, the human must delegate more freedom of action to the collective decision-making algorithms of their autonomous systems.”
Source: An Air Force ‘Way of Swarm’: Using Wargaming and Artificial Intelligence to Train Drones
For other related reporting see:
- AI Security: Four Things to Focus on Right Now
- A Decision-Maker’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence
- When Artificial Intelligence Goes Wrong
- Artificial Intelligence for Business Advantage
- The Future of AI Policy is Largely Unwritten
- AI Will Test American Values In The Battlefield
And for more OODA member network resources see: OODA Member Resources.
