Military beefs up research into swarming drones.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

The concept sounds hard to defeat: dispatch a horde of flying, thinking armed robots that can autonomously coordinate amongst themselves an attack against a target.

If an anti-aircraft weapon takes down one drone, the others change direction, push through and destroy the target kamikaze style.

Senior Air Force officers and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter are among the military leaders who have touted "swarming" robots lately, although the Air Force Research Laboratory doesn't like that term. It prefers "distributed collaborative systems."

The problem with the biological term "swarming" is that it doesn't fully describe where the Air Force and others are going with diis technology, said Kristen Kearns, autonomy portfolio lead at AFRL.

Swarming fish and birds don't collaborate much, she said in an interview. "That collaboration is where we anticipate where you would be able to gain capability as opposed to blindly following or staying out of the way of everything else in the team."

Distributed collaborative systems for the Air Force is "about putting that next level of decision making and capability on the platform. Not only can it maintain itself, but it can work other parts of the team, whether those be airmen, or whether those be other machines to perform a mission task."

Also working on the concept is the Pentagon's Strategic Technology Office.

Carter in a speech at the Economic Club of Washington D.C., in February highlighted the work the office is doing.

One project uses "swarming autonomous vehicles in all sorts of ways and in multiple domains," he said. "In the air, they develop micro-drones that are really fast, really resistant. They can fly through heavy winds and be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach 0.9, like they did during an operational exercise in Alaska last year, or they can be thrown into the air by a soldier in the middle of the Iraqi desert."

Peter W. Singer, a strategist at the New America Foundation, said, "Swarming has several potential benefits. It is a way to gain the effect of greater intelligence without each individual unit needing to be intelligent. Think how ants can perform incredibly complex tasks, even though each ant is not all that smart."

Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of the Air Force Material Command in a speech last year, said swarming drones "can be very much a game-changing reality for our Air Force in the future."

Today, once a missile is launched at a target, the human is out of...