DARPA Aims to Find Out How Many Drones One Human Can Control

What Happened?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently conducted an exercise to find out how many drones a single human operator can effectively control during combat.

Julie A. Adams, the associate director of research at Oregon State University’s Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute, led the study.

It was conducted under DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program.

For the study, researchers wanted to see how well a single human could manage control of over one hundred different drones. Even under simulated combat conditions the team found that the human operator could handle the task.

Why it Matters

Two major conflicts in 2024 utilized drones in combat in novel ways, the Russia-Ukraine war and the Gaza War between Israel and HAMAS.

Especially in the Ukrainian theater, a very large number of drones were used in combat for a sustained time period, making it the first conflict in history to do so.

Exactly how many remains unclear, but credible estimates put the number of drones used in Ukraine in the thousands. This includes aerial, ground, and water vehicles.

Most of the drones utilized in Ukraine and Gaza require a dedicated human operator. That means there is a one-to-one relationship between the number of drones being used and the number of operators being employed.

The DARPA experiment is important because military strategists and planners already see the potential for drone swarms to be used in battle, and swarms must either be autonomous or controlled by humans. Autonomous swarming has had mixed results, and using a swarm where every single drone requires a human is also difficult to coordinate.

DARPA sees a single operator controlling multiple drones as a possible solution to this problem, and its likely Russia and China are already working on similar endeavors. A successful swarm commander could be able to direct an entire fleet of drones without the technical need for full drone autonomy or cumbersome human to human communication.

This experiment used highly trained and experienced personnel and only ran simulated battles for a few hours at a time. The results suggest that while qualified personnel may be able to command drone swarms for short periods of time, it’s unlikely untrained or inexperienced operators would be able to do so at all.

Drone warfare is undergoing a rapid series of advancements thanks to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. This is likely to yield new capabilities for those who can master and apply lessons learned from these conflicts.

How it Affects You

Drones are becoming more numerous everywhere, not just on modern battlefields.

The ability for one person to command a hundred or more drones could provide deadly new capabilities not just for national military organizations but for terrorists, criminal groups, and even lone wolf style attackers.

Its likely that new drone capabilities will eventually migrate from the battlefields of Ukraine and Gaza to the rest of the world.