This military technology allows a single operator to handle more than 100 drones

Thanks to this technology, using a virtual reality interface, a single operator can handle up to 130 drones with minimal prior training.

Drones are here to stay, to facilitate exploration and rescue work, but also for new war capabilities that could be seen in a hypothetical military mission, and the Pentagon has developed a technology that allows a single person to control 130 drones.

It is a project carried out by the defense contracting company Raytheon that it is working together with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and it is a technology so advanced that it has even been successfully tested in an urban environment both indoors and outdoors, explain in a press release.

This technology is known in English as OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET), and that swarm is actually a set of 130 physical drones but also 30 simulated drones. They point out that the software and hardware used in this experiment allow a single operator to control a large set of these devices, and above with a minimum training.

“Controlling a swarm of drones changes the way an operator or a group of operators thinks about drones. The conclusions of this exercise help inform us about the inflection points between utility and manageability.”, says Shane Clark, OFFSET Principal Investigator at Raytheon.

But forget about those operators who use a joystick to control drones, because this technology is being used of a virtual reality interface which allows them to look through each drone individually, thus creating an interactive virtual view of the environment.

“You can look behind a building to get a view of drone locations, for example, and use the VR environment to test and see if your mission is viable.”, they explain in the statement.

But they go much further, because they have also managed to create a voice interface that allows these operators to give voice commands to this entire set of drones, thus allowing them to act quickly while maintaining situational awareness.