SBIR/STTR Award attributes
HEADS is a synergistic, platform agnostic, sensing and communications hardware suite designed to enable next generation swarming robotics. Future tactical swarm systems will use the advantage of numbers to evade, endure and attack enemy forces on the battlefield. Like swarms in nature, the strength of numbers ensures the survival of the species. These combat systems will require revolutionary advances in communications and sensing. HEADS leverages the latest generation of miniaturized communications transceiver technology to deliver simultaneous wide scale mesh networking combined with relative localization. HEADS allows large swarms of 100-1000 units to communicate in emergent logical formations while measuring position relative to the rest of the swarm. Formations can logically split into sub-swarms and rejoin. Multi-domain communications is used to allow short range communications to not interfere with longer range messaging between sub-swarms. Revolutionary advances in communications are a critical capability required by future tactical swarm robotics. With recent advances in integrated sensors, devices designed for smartphones, arrays of multi-domain combined sensing and communications devices are now feasible to package even onto miniaturized small unmanned and other robotics. A heavy, fragile and expensive scanning LIDAR can now be replaced by an array of chip-scale flash LIDARs and high frequency radars with significantly more performance at orders of magnitude lower cost and weight. This sensing array will enable small robots to reliably “feel” their environment with low latency and in diverse environmental conditions. Current state of the art robotic sensing suites do not have the required mix of low cost, lightweight and reliable operation in all conditions required for future swarm tactical capabilities. These systems, which are a critical requirement to maintain future battlefield dominance, require a revolutionary approach like HEADS to bring them to reality. HEADS combines state of the art sensing and communications into one system, modular and able to be integrated with COTS SUAS, with platform agnostic autonomy drivers able to swarm-enable existing SUAS to fill critical capability gaps and will protect US warfighters in future conflicts.
