L3Harris' AMORPHOUS software targets drone swarm C2 capability

Drone swarms present a clear and present danger on the battlefield. (US Army)

L3Harris is maturing a new command-and-control (C2) software architecture aimed squarely at drone swarm operations, an architecture programme officials anticipate of being capable of handing control of thousands of unmanned systems to a single operator.

“We are really trying to address the need the [US] military will have as they start to really field autonomous systems in large numbers,” said Jon Rambeau, president of Integrated Mission Systems at L3Harris. “How do we operate autonomous systems at scale?” he told Janes .

The solution company officials have developed the Autonomous Multi-domain Operations Resiliency Platform for Heterogeneous Unmanned Swarms (AMORPHOUS) programme, which is a C2 software architecture that can co-ordinate drone swarm operations across domains “not in the hundreds [but] into the thousands” of autonomous systems under a single C2 digital backbone, according to Rambeau.

“The goal is to control those assets with a very small number of operators,” he added.

Based on an open-architecture design created by L3Harris and third-party developers, the C2 software underpinning the AMORPHOUS programme is the company's “smart swarm technology”, which is more akin to a data mesh network construct, according to Rambeau.

Under AMORPHOUS, “a command would be passed to the [drone] swarm, and then members of the swarm would communicate with one another, and they would determine how to jointly accomplish” a given mission, he said during a February interview.

“If one member of the [swarm] falls out, the others recognise that it happened, and they communicate about how to fill that gap,” he added.