Naval Postgraduate School aims to break drone record
By Phillip Molnar, Monterey Herald
Camp Roberts >> Try not to panic Thursday if you see a swarm of autonomous drones flying in south Monterey County.
Monterey’s Naval Postgraduate School will try to break the record for launching and flying the most drones simultaneously at Camp Roberts. It follows a team of researchers’ successful attempt to set the record for a swarm of autonomous drones — 20 — a few weeks ago, with hopes to eventually reach 50.
The drones used are small, fixed-winged aircraft with a propeller in back. The school says the purpose of the experiment is to develop technology to counter potential enemy drones the U.S. military may experience in the future.
The project is led by professor Timothy Chung and members of his Advanced Robotic Systems Engineering Laboratory.
“Swarming is the notion of having multiple agents that work in a coordinated manner to achieve some sort of objective,” Chung said in a post on NPS’ website. “It is relevant in our work here at NPS because with the presence of unmanned systems, we need to start thinking about scenarios where we or an adversary might start using large groups of these unmanned systems in a combined way.”
The drones can be flown autonomously using “basic leader-follower cooperative behaviors,” NPS said.
The research is partially in support of a classified project that looks at ways an adversary may use large groups of drones, such as a “dive bomb,” Cheng said.
Chung said one drone that could do something like that is Israel’s Harpy, which The Associated Press describes a “Fire-and-Forget” autonomous weapon system designed to detect, attack and destroy radar emitters.
The Camp Roberts experiment is closed to the public but some media have been invited to attend.
