Customer: Raytheon BBN Technologies
Timeline: 2019 to present
Products/Solutions included:
Project:
OCEUS Networks teamed up with Raytheon BBN Technologies to perform in DARPA’s third field experiment within its OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program, which aims to develop the capability for swarms of up to 250 autonomous vehicles to collaborate in providing critical information and situational awareness to small military ground units in constrained urban environments.
Solution:
In the experiment, BBN successfully employed OCEUS’s Xiphos Macro 4.0 Private LTE solution as the transport backbone network with LTE modems to provide the bandwidth for BBN to control swarms of autonomous UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles) that were deployed to demonstrate a raid in an urban area. These were programmed to seek multiple simulated items of interest located in the buildings at the Combined Arms Collective Training Facility (CACTF) at the Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi. These items were represented by AprilTag 2D bar code and served as items of interest requiring further investigation or hazards to avoid or render safe during an initial intelligence-gathering phase of a mission.
The OCEUS/BBN partnership swarm of 60-100 autonomous air and ground vehicles successfully relayed information from the tags to human operators, who employed various swarm tactics to isolate and secure the buildings containing the items of interest. Subswarms of autonomous vehicles were also deployed to maintain situational awareness and continue observation of the surrounding environment. The exercise was a demo of the capabilities of private LTE as a transport medium in a tactical urban environment. The OCEUS/BBN team is moving forward to the fourth DARPA experiment and 200-plus autonomous vehicles.
