A mass of unmanned aerial drones attacking enemy targets and controlled by the mind of a single soldier is the end point of an ambitious research program being funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.

A new but unspecified advance in mind-controlled drone swarms was made recently at Arizona State University (ASU). This brings the program a step closer to the point a single operator can operate multiple flying and ground-based drones using his thoughts.

Like Us on Facebook

Panagiotis Artemiadis, director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab at ASU, said research began with the idea of human swarm interaction.

"We record it from the brain," he said. "We actually saw that the brain really cares about collective behaviors of swarms and now we know where to record from and what to see from the brain signals in order to decode that to collective behaviors for aerial vehicles and swarms of robots."

Artemiadis, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at ASU, has been working on linking the human brain with machines since 2009.

He's been working on mind-controlled drone swarms for the last two years with funding from DARPA, which is developing its own aerial drone swarms for use in war under its Gremlins program.

So far, Artemiadis and his team have displayed limited mind-control of both flying and ground-based drones simultaneously. The team will expand its research to include multiple swarms under the control of multiple people.

Artemiadis sees the mind-controlled drones "performing complex operations such as search-and-rescue missions."

"The goal for the next couple of years is to actually have now a hybrid team of both ground vehicles, mobile robots and aerial vehicles -- quadrotors -- that will collaborate with each other," he said. "We want to do that with tens, even go to 100 robots."

Artemiadis' work will go a long way towards advancing DARPA's Gremlins program that seeks to illustrate the feasibility of conducting safe, reliable operations of multiple air-launched, air-recoverable unmanned systems.

Gremlins also aims to prove reusable systems can provide significant cost advantages over expendable systems, spreading out payload and airframe costs over multiple uses instead of just one.

An ability to send large numbers of small unmanned air systems (UAS) with coordinated, distributed capabilities can provide U.S. military forces with improved operational flexibility at much lower cost than is possible with today's expensive, all-in-one platforms -- especially if those unmanned systems could be retrieved for reuse while airborne. Gremlins intends to attain this aim.

"Our goal is to conduct a compelling proof-of-concept flight demonstration that could employ intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and other modular, non-kinetic payloads in a robust, responsive and affordable manner," said Dan Patt, DARPA program manager.

The program envisions launching groups of gremlins from large aircraft such as bombers or transport aircraft, as well as from fighters and other small, fixed-wing platforms while those planes are out of range of enemy defenses.

When the gremlins complete their mission, a C-130 transport aircraft will retrieve them in the air and carry them home, where ground crews would prepare them for their next use within 24 hours.

Tagsmind-controlled drone swarm, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, Panagiotis Artemiadis