Hier kommt der Drohnenschwarm

20170109_us-drohnenschwarm

Die US-Streitkräfte haben bereits im vergangenen Jahr (aber erst jetzt öffentlich bekannt geworden) einen autonomen Drohnenschwarm getestet: 103 Mini-Drohnen, die aus Kampfflugzeugen abgeworfen wurden und sich dann als Schwarm selbst organisiert haben – ein weiterer Schritt auf dem Weg zu vollständig autonomen Systemen.

Aus der Pressemitteilung des Pentagon:

In one of the most significant tests of autonomous systems under development by the Department of Defense, the Strategic Capabilities Office, partnering with Naval Air Systems Command, successfully demonstrated one of the world’s largest micro-drone swarms at China Lake, California. The test, conducted in October 2016 and documented on Sunday’s CBS News program “60 Minutes”, consisted of 103 Perdix drones launched from three F/A-18 Super Hornets. The micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing.

(…)
“Due to the complex nature of combat, Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” said SCO Director William Roper. “Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team.”
The demonstration is one of the first examples of the Pentagon using teams of small, inexpensive, autonomous systems to perform missions once achieved only by large, expensive ones.

Das Fact Sheet zu Perdix gibt es hier.

Dazu gibt es auch ein Video:

(Das Video unbedingt bis zum Ende ansehen – dann wirkt es schon ein wenig erschreckend.)

Und ein wenig mehr Info von der Washington Post – auch zur Kritik an den Gefahren solcher Systeme:

In a February report, Paul Scharre, a senior fellow at Center for a New American Security, highlighted the risk of autonomous weapons stating that they “pose a novel risk of mass fratricide, with large numbers of weapons turning on friendly forces.”
“This could be because of hacking, enemy behavioral manipulation, unexpected interactions with the environment, or simple malfunctions or software errors,” Scharre wrote. “Moreover, as the complexity of the system increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to verify the system’s behavior under all possible conditions; the number of potential interactions within the system and with its environment is simply too large.”

(Foto: Screenshot aus dem Pentagon-Video)