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Simulating Ants' Behavior May Help U.S. Fight Future Wars By Gail Kaufman A small army of carpenter ants boils from their nest, each taking its own meandering path toward a pile of bread crumbs and leaving chemical pheromones in its tracks. The ant that takes the shortest route returns first, and the rest of the colony follows its double-tracked pheromone trail to the food. Some Pentagon researchers believe this type of naturally occurring phenomenon, in which a decentralized group achieves a common goal, may guide the armed forces of the future. Several labs are working on ways to model the behavior of swarms, whether of ants, unmanned aerial vehicles or even infantry soldiers. "Swarm intelligence is a shift in mindset: from centralized control to decentralized control and distributed intelligence; from predefined solutions that may break down with the first glitch . to emergent, self-organizing strategies and tactics," said Eric Bonabeau, chief scientist for Icosystem Corp. The Cambridge, Mass., firm recently was hired by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Office of Naval Research to support several studies by modeling and simulating swarms. Metal Swarms Air Force lab officials want to know whether groups of cheap yet intelligent UAVs might someday take on roles far beyond the capabilities of today's aircraft. Like the ants, a man-made swarm might be able to find and destroy moving targets with little, if any, outside guidance; or it might create a diversion, allowing friendly troops to move undetected past an enemy tank platoon or anti-aircraft battery. The swarm might even prove effective at controlling mobs. Consider the typical human response when hordes of yellow jackets arrive at a picnic table, an AFRL engineer told a UAV conference last summer. "It is really one nonlethal way of crowd control," said Bruce Clough, a technical expert for control automation. "Naturally, a human psyche gets scared by swarms." Icosystem, at the military's bidding, created a computer program that modeled a notional swarm of up to 110 UAVs. Like ants and their pheromones, the simulated UAVs emitted signals to tell the rest of the swarm about conditions in their immediate vicinity. AFRL researchers used the program to test various theories and techniques. How much outside information does a swarm need to find a target? How many individual elements does it take to cover a square mile, or 100 square miles? How well does swarming work vs. traditional command-and-control approaches? Company officials now are quantifying those results and shopping those ideas to three major defense and aerospace firms to commercialize them. The results, while encouraging, also carried a warning about autonomous behavior. "Obviously, we have to make sure that the UAVs don't self-organize into some dangerous, pathological configuration," Bona-beau said. "We have to be able to trust them because their collective behavior is not predefined. That is the goal of current research." The operator-UAV ratio - it currently takes several operators to fly a single UAV - must be reduced as well, Bonabeau said. Ground Swarms Other military branches are trying to learn how they might apply swarm techniques to their own troops' actions. For example, a system of decentralized action might help soldiers operate better in urban areas, where enemies can easily disappear among crowds or in buildings. Navy researchers and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are building computer models and algorithms to find ways that multiple air and ground vehicles might find and trap an enemy in highly populated environments. Similar techniques also might be used to deceive an enemy: What looks like a minor skirmish might actually be a concerted attack. Awareness of the possibilities of the swarm also may keep U.S. forces from enduring another disaster like the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, in which Army forces were overwhelmed by a mixture of gangs, guerillas, and heretofore peaceful residents. Although this type of research is in the early stages, the swarm intelligence concept is gaining momentum throughout the Defense Department. A recent study conducted by Project Alpha, an in-house think-tank at U.S. Joint Force's Command, embraced Bonabeau's ideas. Last year, the office gave Pentagon leaders a slew of recommendations to strengthen swarm intelligence research. "We're hoping to do a whole sequence of [swarm-related] projects, including a live demonstration," said Gary Trinkle, team lead for Project Alpha's study, "Swarming Entities - The Operational Utilities of Establishing Humans-on-the-Loop." As futuristic as data-linked UAVs may be, the concepts that drive the swarm are thousands of years old. Ask Project Alpha's historians, and they'll tell you that the Parthians used them to win the Battle of Carrhae in 53 B.C., routing the rigid Roman army with surprise cavalry counterattacks. About Icosystem Corporation Icosystem Corporation, a strategy consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has emerged as a leader in the development of business applications for network theory and complexity science. Using the tools of complexity science and advanced computational techniques, Icosystem provides a highly flexible and cost-effective technology platform for exploring business problems and discovering or designing strategies that have significant impact. Icosystem's approach uses realistic models of complex business environments and evolutionary and distributed computational techniques to validate new business ventures or improve the performance of existing enterprises. |
