CounterSwarm:Turning Collective Intelligence against Hostile Drone Swarms

Abstract

The CounterSwarm project aims at testing the hypothesis that the best way to defend efficiently and affordably against a drone swarm is to play “tit for tat” and use another drone swarm. In nature, the species that most successfully resist an attack by social insects (the original inspiration for autonomous drone swarms) are other social insects. The reason is simple: both sides have the same characteristics in terms of their intrinsic ability to self-organise in response to highly dynamic circumstances, based on incomplete information and without any centralised control structure (and the vulnerability associated with it). The end goal of this project is to identify methods for adapting the collective intelligence paradigm to swarm tactics, and to develop conceptual, analytical, and numerical tools to evaluate performance in defence applications