SOAR TECHNOLOGY, LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A16-036

Description

Swarms are complex systems that exhibit non-intuitive, emergent behaviors. Current design approaches rely heavily on the expertise of the designer and extensive experimentation and tuning. Soar Technology (SoarTech) proposes to develop a swarm engineering environment for the Design of Self Organizing Adaptive Robotic Swarms (DSOARS). By employing both a top down and bottom up constructive approach DSOARS will fundamentally change how reliable swarming systems are configured and deployed.Effective swarm design must address three core challenges: (1) Decomposing mission tasks into the appropriate atomic behaviors and interactions of the swarm entities to achieve the necessary swarm-level behavior, (2) adapting and tuning the size, configuration, and behavior of the swarm to the specific mission at hand, and (3) verifying that the emergent swarm behavior consistently achieves the mission goals with a high level of confidence.DSOARS addresses these challenges through two primary innovations: (1) verified swarm design patterns and mapping rules to decompose mission tasks into individual behaviors for achieving desired swarm effects and (2) a constructive test and evaluation environment that simultaneously optimizes and verifies a swarm configuration against a wide range of possible mission conditions.