Towards Collaborative Aerial Swarming Architecture for Military Applications

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has long been interested in aerial swarms for military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. Through work with DoD partners, we found a unique need for a dynamic task allocation (TA) algorithm for a swarm of unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Capable control algorithms have already been developed but deploying such algorithms in an actual swarm, reliably, requires information exchange and data organization among the agents. To this end, we introduce a collaborative aerial swarming architecture (CASA), capable of dynamic task allocation and decentralized control. We highlight, through CASA, how this algorithm can be applied to ISR tasks. Finally, we present the results of deploying CASA on a simulated swarm of UAS for a notional ISR task.