Icosystem proposal selected for U.S. Air Force SBIR award to study control of swarms of Unmanned Air Vehicles.

Cambridge, MA - 01 June 2002
Icosystem Corporation has been selected to receive a Phase I SBIR award from the Air Force Laboratory. The proposed project, titled "Evolutionary Swarm Intelligence for Control of Unmanned Air Vehicles," combines swarm intelligence principles and evolutionary computing to design control rules that enable an operator to control the behavior of a swarm of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs).

"This is an exciting project that combines our team's expertise in a variety of areas, including complexity science, evolutionary computing, and control of autonomous vehicles" said Paolo Gaudiano, Icosystem's Vice President of Technology. "As UAVs become smaller and more affordable, it becomes possible to deploy larger and larger swarms of flying vehicles, but the complexity of the problem exceeds the capability of traditional control systems. Our approach is to move away from the traditional `centralized control' paradigm, and to use our knowledge of complex systems to develop a platform for swarm-level control. This means that an operator can instruct the entire UAV swarm to perform a given task - such as flying in a particular formation, or performing a collective search-and-rescue mission - without having to give explicit commands to individual UAVs."

The 9-month project, which begins in June, is supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

About Icosystem Corporation
Icosystem Corporation develops strategies and technologies that drive individual businesses or whole sectors to a phase transition in performance and onto the next level. From its offices in Boston and Paris, Icosystem combines world-class capabilities in complexity science, dynamic modeling and evolutionary computation with its clients' and partners' sector expertise - discovering opportunities for significant improvements to existing businesses and exploring the potential for new ones.

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