SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Precision-guided munitions have demonstrated dramatic effects with minimal collateral damage. New technology developed specifically to deny them accurate guidance information is now feasible, even for non-traditional adversaries. Further, digital communications are flooding the air with signals that interfere with communications many guidance methods rely on. Swarms of small, covert small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) have the potential to provide accurate guidance information even in challenging environments with unreliable communications and little or no other guidance information. Charles River Analytics proposes to design and prototype Wide Area Targeting Computation for Heterogeneous Engagement and Reconnaissance Swarms (WATCHERS). WATCHERS is a coordination, detection, and guidance capability to identify and designate strike targets, and accurately guide inbound indirect fire munitions using a covert sUAS swarm with automatic target recognition (ATR) and guidance information correction as needed by trilaterating its communication signals relative to each sUAS in the swarm. WATCHERS will run on each sUAS, coordinating actions in a robust, fault-tolerant, and interference-resistant manner using probabilistic reasoning derived from established mission parameters. sUAS in the swarm will localize both the target in 3D space using machine learning (ML) computer vision (CV) algorithms and the munition itself to provide real time navigation data in a fault-tolerant, interference-resistant manner.
