An inside look at how one person can control a swarm of 130 robots

Last November, at Fort Campbell, Tennessee, half a mile from the Kentucky border, a single human directed a swarm of 130 robots. The exercise was part of DARPA's OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program. If the experiment can be replicated outside the controlled settings of a test environment, it suggests that managing swarms in war could be as easy as point and click for operators in the field. "The operator of our swarm really was interacting with things as a collective, not as individuals," says Shane Clark, of Raytheon BBN, who was the company's main lead for OFFSET. "We had done the work to establish the sort of baseline levels of autonomy to really support those many-to-one interactions in a natural way."