The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Autonomous Sensors team to field test autonomous drone swarms at the main LLNL site.
The certificate of authorization enables the team to operate up to 100 drones during the daytime over the next two years as part of efforts to evaluate swarm controls and sensor payloads designed for national security applications.
Brian Wihl, systems engineer at LLNL and the initiative’s project lead, said the national lab seeks to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to its autonomous sensors but could not field-test the technologies.
“Receiving this approval enables us to take the next step in our research. We’ll be able to apply swarming technology across several national security mission spaces to see how the swarms learn and respond in real-time,” Wihl said.
Jacob Trueblood, Autonomous Sensors electrical hardware team lead and principal investigator for the initiative, said the broad-use-case approval would enable rapid development of software tools and allow the lab to benchmark available software and recommend future updates.
