Few truly autonomous systems have been deployed on the battlefield, but one startup is looking to change that with robotic systems that use cooperative behavior to give soldiers more intelligence and a tactical advantage. These systems, called “swarms,” are essentially collections of autonomous robots that can coordinate their actions.
Swarm robots are the stuff of science fiction, but Swarmbotics AI emerged today in secret to make the concept a reality. The startup is developing an ecosystem of products called ANTS (Attritable, Networked, Tactical Swarm) that could revolutionize battlefield logistics.
Swarmbotics was founded last summer by Steven Horton and Drew Watson, who met while working at self-driving truck company Embark Trucks, where Horton served as COO and Watson ran product operations.
Their experience with robotic systems goes back much further. Horton, a former Marine Corps officer, was an early employee at Cruise, the self-driving car maker now owned by General Motors. He stayed on as the company grew from about 40 employees to 3,000 as of December last year, eventually becoming vice president of global markets. From there, he led Amazon Web Services' self-driving cars and robotics business. Watson, meanwhile, had a long career at the CIA before joining NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, eventually leading software development for the space agency's Valkyrie humanoid robot program.
Embark was acquired by Applied Intuition last summer, and the two companies are now deciding what their next move will be.
Image credit: Swarmbotics
“We've become obsessed with robot swarms,” Houghton says. There are a few reasons for this, he explains. In the private sector, most of the capital and time has gone into developing very expensive autonomous systems like robotaxis, which have to be nearly perfect before they're deployed and used alongside humans. But the two began thinking about use cases where cheaper, less sophisticated robots could be aggregated and deployed more quickly.
Swarm robotics is still a relatively new field of research. Much of the work on drone swarms has been done in academia rather than on the battlefield. In places like Ukraine, where drones have been used extensively in the war with Russia, most of those systems are remotely operated by humans and have not demonstrated autonomous cooperative behavior.
Both airborne and ground swarms could be game-changers, Houghton acknowledged. But each has very different challenges and benefits. Airborne is easier to maneuver, while ground robots can generally stay in the field longer and carry more weight. Swarm Botics is focusing on the latter area and is starting with two platforms. One is the Haul ANT, a large hybrid-electric autonomous ATV, and the other is the smaller 60-pound Fire ANT. Both are essentially batteries on the move. Swarm Botics will provide platforms that customers can use for a variety of payloads, including intelligence, surveillance, electronic warfare, kinematics and medevac. Houghton said the goal is to achieve maximum flexibility and interoperability for the Defense Department.
Image credit: Swarmbotics
“The great thing about these low-cost robots is that you can quickly scale them to hundreds or thousands,” he says. “There are different ways, called 'play', for swarming that you can start using.”
Moving from expensive systems to lower-cost platforms is a massive effort across multiple Defense Department programs — the department launched big initiatives like Replicator to acquire low-cost systems in bulk from private companies — and it's a big shift in thinking, Houghton said.
“Everywhere I've been, you have to look for the most powerful sensor — the breakthrough, the hit, the very expensive sensor with the best features,” he said. “We're kind of doing the opposite. We're saying, if we want to keep this as a consumable platform, what's the optimum price for the sensor performance? We're not looking for something that's 10 times the price and best in class, because it's not profitable and doesn't make sense on a consumable platform. That way we can produce it in volume faster.”
Swarmbotics has raised just over $4 million from Quiet Capital, Silent Ventures, LMNT Ventures and Soma Capital, most of which is going towards engineering. The company is currently focused on continuing to provide increasingly sophisticated technology to Department of Defense acquisition officers, but eventually plans to sell its robots to private companies as well.
The 11-person company has developed some of the first platforms in the ANTS ecosystem and is focused on adding agents, building out the swarm technology, and continually improving the autonomy of individual robots. The goal is for the swarm to have a set of “plays” that users can decide to execute depending on what they want the robots to do.
“As we continue to add more multi-agents to the swarm, we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what this is possible.”