L3Harris unveils Amorphous autonomy software to manage drone swarms
Summary
“That’s really not something that’s possible to do with human control only.” While some concepts for autonomous command-and-control rely on a “mothership,” a single platform serving as the brains of a fleet of uncrewed systems, L3Harris envisions Amorphous coordinating a “leaderless swarm,” according to Toby Magsig, vice president and general manager of enterprise autonomous systems. Amorphous has already made its debut in prototypes the company is developing for various Pentagon programs, including Replicator, and has its roots in work the L3Harris has done for the Navy’s Project Overmatch and Army Research Laboratory experimentation. For Replicator — the Pentagon’s high-profile effort to field thousands of uncrewed systems by next August — L3Harris was selected in November alongside Anduril Industries and Swarm Aero to demonstrate the ability to coordinate hundreds or thousands of platforms through an effort called Autonomous Collaborative Teaming. Managed by the Defense Innovation Unit, the program is looking for software that can be upgraded iteratively and can run on any hardware system. “That’s one of the things that we put into this design.” Magsig declined to offer much detail on the Replicator demonstrations that Amorphous has supported, but said the software has been involved in a few events and “there’s many more to go.”