L3Harris unveils plan to control thousands of autonomous systems simultaneously

Defense contractor L3Harris is developing an ambitious effort to control thousands of autonomous systems at the same time through a single user interface.

Much work remains, however. Company officials noted that in live testing, the firm has experimented with fewer than 100 platforms to date, although they hope to soon begin expanding that.

The technology, dubbed Autonomous Multidomain Operations Resiliency Platform for Heterogenous Unmanned Swarms (AMORPHOUS), gets at some of the difficult challenges the Defense Defense is trying to tackle as it relates to autonomy.

“One of the big problems that has yet to be solved is, how do you think about the control of not 10, not 100, not even 1,000 — but thousands of assets simultaneously? And that’s really not something that’s possible to do with human control only. You have to have a system that can be the orchestra conductor once it’s given a command,” Jon Rambeau, president of integrated mission systems at L3Harris, told reporters last week ahead of the company’s announcement on Monday. “We think the problem to be solved here for our Defense Department customers is, how do warfighters command and control autonomous assets at scale — that’s thousands of assets — and really do that in the combat scenario that’s going to involve not just the autonomous assets, but also manned assets, aircraft, surface vessels, subsurface vessels?”

Executives said AMORPHOUS and associated technologies have been on multiple contracts to date, and they believe the overall solution has a lot of room to scale and meet the DOD’s problems.

In designing the architecture, Rambeau noted that the company wanted to develop something that could be disaggregated given how fast and distributed the battlefield of the future is poised to be.

The so-called “mothership” concept, in which swarms of systems are controlled by a central brain, is likely not ideal, he said, given that capability could be thwarted by adversaries.

“We believe that’s not the best approach, because if something happens, that asset’s degraded, it’s attacked, it’s no longer able to communicate, then what happens? We’ve come up with an architecture that allows the control to pass from one asset to another seamlessly, so if the swarm is degraded, they continue to function,” Rambeau said.

The contractor has developed a single user concept where a warfighter could control assets with a tablet across all domains of warfare.

Company officials noted that AMORPHOUS has been designed with an open architecture to be able to integrate various platforms built by a variety of vendors. The software integrates onto any vendor’s hardware, they said.

To date, AMORPHOUS has only been live tested in “double-digit” numbers of systems, officials said, but they hope to see that go to “triple digits” in the not-too-distant future.

The ultimate intent is to control thousands of platforms — a concept that can be challenging to test given the scalability and availability of ranges and systems. There’s expected to be reliance on live, virtual, constructive methods.

The architecture L3Harris is using for AMORPHOUS, however, has already successfully stress-tested over 100 assets, despite AMORPHOUS itself not testing that much, according to company officials.

They expressed confidence in the system’s ability to be able to begin scaling given they are drawing from programs that have successfully operated at a larger scale.

While the capability and associated tech have worked with multiple military services, L3Harris officials noted there isn’t necessarily an on-ramp for a single service to onboard it, but rather, all the services desire the technology and it’s applicable to all.

“All the services are asking for the same thing. One of the reasons we formed an enterprise autonomy team inside of L3Harris is this is not service specific,” said Toby Magsig, vice president and general manager of enterprise autonomous solutions at the company. “This is taking a more centralized look at what is the right architecture, the right approach, the right technology to give all the services what they need to be able to do this multi-domain, multi-asset, swarm-of-swarm solution. I think we’re seeing them all ask for the same thing, but they all are benefiting from a multi-domain approach.”

While AMORPHOUS is being designed for a single user interface, officials explained they are also building it for the operational level of war and below, meaning there must be multiple user interfaces for others to have control.

In joint operations at the four-star combatant command level, operations towards objectives are carried out across multiple domains by multiple services. While an Army soldier likely won’t be controlling both land and maritime systems, there has to be a way for multiple users interfaces to monitor and provide direction for thousands of systems in a swarm on future battlefields.

“When you’re talking at this scale, there’s going to be multiple commanders that are interested in what the effects are and how this is being used,” Magsig said. “When you look at multi-domain, it’s really the joint commanders that are providing that level of joint integration across multiple domains, and are going to have control of the scale of heterogeneous swarm.”