As unmanned aerial vehicles continue to shape the landscape of war, a team of cadets collaborated at the cutting edge of autonomous study through the Swarm Troopers research project in the lead-up to the Projects Day Research Symposium, April 23 at the U.S. Military Academy. This research aims to use drones to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to determine the location of mines with acute accuracy.

Team Swarm Troopers consists of nine cadets pursuing different STEM majors under the guidance of assistant professors Dr. Josiah Steckenrider and Mr. Dominic Larkin. Leadership rotates among team members, allowing each cadet to spend time monitoring progress, managing schedules and ensuring members are meeting their respective deadlines. Currently, Class of 2026 Cadet David Liu acts as team leader.

“The idea is that we can give a Soldier a swarm of drones and a mobile device to specify a fly zone where they want to search,” Liu said. “Then we use a custom algorithm that’s able to generate a flight path. The drones will then go out and conduct the mission.”

Rather than being directed to specific target locations, the drones will autonomously determine where to go before searching the field of interest. The project focuses on two primary aspects of autonomy: coordinated swarm behavior and perception-based target identification.

“On the perception side,” Steckenrider said, ?the first piece is where the drones fly and how they do so efficiently. Then, once we see things on the ground, how do we intelligently process that information into a probabilistic heat map for the user”?

The term ?heat map” refers to hot spots, or specific landmine locations. The perception software that identifies hot spots was custom-built, which involved training artificial intelligence to observe landmines on the battlefield through fitted cameras.