A Tactical Command Approach to Human Control of Vehicle Swarms

Human control of vehicle swarms faces a dilemma: an operator must be able to exercise precise control over how amission is executed, but controlling individual vehicles is not scalable. The Proto spatial computing language offers an intermediate representation, where the motion of a swarm is specified as a vector field, which is then approximated by the movement of individual members (Bachrach, Beal, and McLurkin 2010). I propose that this can be exploited to build a “tactical command” model of swarm control, whereby human “officers” dynamically decompose a swarm into units and task those units to carry out geometric and topological maneuvers under the constraints imposed by the platform. This abstraction may also allow situation awareness interfaces for individual agents to be extended to apply to swarm units.