Birds of a feather: local firm develops robot planes that 'swarm'
By John Gever
For the Dominion Post
The Pentagon doesn't like soldiers. Not for combat, anyway.
True, throughout history, humans have done all the fighting, and the military continues to rely on young men and women to put themselves in harm's way. But with that comes casualties. Generals and admirals -- not to mention the folks at home -- hate casualties.
A solution is at hand, thanks to technologies that have begun to offer ways for the military to do its job without endangering its own people. Perhaps the best known example is the Predator drone, an unmanned, missile-equipped airplane that can follow and destroy a target while its "pilot" stays safely on the ground.
It's a bold advance, but not a complete solution. As many as 30 people are needed to manage a Predator in the air, and it's nowhere near as capable as a conventional warplane flown by one or two people.
Now, a Morgantown company is helping to move pilotless aircraft technology to the next level -- unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, that not only fly themselves, but that can be deployed in self-directed groups for missions that no single aircraft could possibly manage.
When this goal is finally achieved, in perhaps ten years, it would be a big step toward taking the danger out of soldiering -- and out of many civilian jobs as well.
The project looks like a significant departure for Augusta Systems Inc., originally founded to develop pollution management software and other services for the energy industry.
But actually, according to Jim Dobbs, the company's director of corporate relations, the challenges in developing software to control a small plane are similar to those the firm has already overcome in writing programs for managing power-plant gas emissions.
Moreover, Augusta has help. It's working with Alion Science and Technology Corp., based in McLean, Va., and with faculty and students at WVU Institute of Technology in Montgomery.
Alion has opened an office in the Prete Building in Suncrest, next door to an Augusta satellite office dedicated to the project.
Said Pat Esposito II, Augusta's chief operating officer, "It's the dawn of an entirely new type of aerial vehicle." Eventually, the team will develop the robotic brains that will allow hundreds or thousands of UAVs -- with wingspans of 7-10 feet and weighing no more than 20 pounds -- to fly in loose groups, neither colliding nor getting too far from the others. They would also be able to exchange data with each other as well as humans on the ground, and to cooperate.
It's called swarming. Although flocks of birds might seem the best model, birds in groups don't do much of value other than stay in formation. The project's real inspiration is more down-to-earth: ants.
An ant colony is able to build a nest, forage for food, nurture its queen and her offspring, defend against invaders, and even mount attacks on other colonies or large creatures. It does all this without any central control, and with individuals whose brains are no bigger than that of, well, an ant.
John Moody, the company's top software guy for the project, said this is known to biologists as "emergent behavior" and, while the end results seem astonishingly complex, they actually grow from a few simple rules.
Just two rules, he said, are sufficient for ants to find food and bring it back to the nest. "One, when you travel, you leave a pheromone (a chemical marker). Two, follow the strongest pheromone trail." Thousands of ants may leave a nest, but these rules allow them to quickly focus on the most efficient routes to and from food sources.
What ants do, the Pentagon wants to do. As Moody tells it, say the military is engaged in an area where an enemy might be present and might have chemical weapons. An ordinary warplane might be shot down, as could a single large drone. Moreover, one plane can be in only one place at a time -- it could take hours to cover a large area.
Now, Moody said, imagine 100 small UAVs equipped with cameras and/or chemical and bioweapon detectors. "There's enough intelligence up there for them to be able to coordinate where they're located, near each other, and they can also look at things on the ground," he said. The human control could simply be one person with a handheld computer telling the "flock" generally where to go.
"Instead of somebody looking at a video screen, they (the planes) look at it and (decide) there is something of interest there." Based on the strength of that interest, their pre-programmed rules might send three of the flock to take a closer look, Moody said, "and by the way, that does look suspicious, so you with the chemical sensor go with them too."
Basically, said Esposito, "you're putting the smarts in the air."
The advantage, of course, is that 96 of the 100 planes are still there to look for additional threats. Moreover, if a few should become disabled, the "swarm" is still fully functional.
One of the group's challenges is to pack that intelligence into a 20-pound craft. Moody said the brain needs to be far smaller than a laptop computer; even a Palm-type handheld is probably too massive.
But most of their work is on the software. Moody said 95 percent of the hardware they will need is available today, versus about five percent of the software.
Because the planes they're working with are so small, using them as weapons platforms is not on their agenda. That may come eventually, but in the foreseeable future, the military is developing UAVs for reconnaissance and surveillance.
The group's funding comes from the Office of Naval Research, with help from West Virginia's congressional delegation.
Other branches of the military, including the Coast Guard as well as the Army and Air Force, are sponsoring similar programs.
Not all of them involve aircraft. The Navy has a separate project to develop small, swarming submarines, while the Army is very interested in robotic ground vehicles.
The technology developed by Augusta and its partners could prove useful in all of them, and in civilian applications as well.
Small UAV swarms, comprising perhaps three or four craft, would be ideal for monitoring gas and oil pipelines, Moody said. Mapping is another obvious use, as is border surveillance. (In June, the U.S. Border Patrol began using remote-controlled drones to detect illegal immigration across the Arizona-Mexico border.)
The Federal Aviation Administration is taking the prospect seriously. It is now working on rules for integrating robotic planes into the nation's civilian airspace.
And again, aircraft are not the only potential application. Researchers at the University of Nebraska are developing traffic-control barrels that arrange themselves into position along highways.
Esposito pointed out that, if Augusta succeeds in making itself a player in this field, it should have a big positive impact on West Virginia's economy.
"It takes a lot of different skill sets to manage a high tech business," he said. The firm wouldn't only hire computer scientists and engineers, but accountants and business managers as well.
"We're West Virginia cheerleaders," added Dobbs, who left a job in Sen. Robert C. Byrd's Washington office to join Augusta. "The more the technology workforce grows, the better it is for everybody."
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