Towards a shared understanding for UxV Swarming

Since 2020, UxVs have revolutionized warfare, primarily because of the conflict in 
Ukraine where uncrewed platforms are routinely deployed by the tens of thousands on a daily basis. 
With the industrial ecosystem slowly rising to the challenge of mass-producing these platforms, 
it is only a matter of time before such devices are being deployed in large cooperating groups. By 
2030, we will have autonomous swarms operating on the battlefield and, depending on how you 
define the term “swarming”, this is already the case. The lack of a shared understanding of what 
that term “swarming” means is increasingly becoming an issue. 
The reason for this is that the term swarming has become a hype word, used almost 
indiscriminately for a broad range of concepts and ideas by various involved parties. This makes 
a shared understanding almost impossible and therefore impacts the conversation between 
stake holders, researchers and industry. 
With the goal of designing and building operational high-TRL (Technology Readiness Level) 
swarms that can be deployed for mission-specific purposes in contested adversarial 
environments, we need a means to facilitate an understanding between those meant to operate 
such swarms (who have needs and requirements), those responsible for deploying swarms (who 
are subject to operational constraints and legal frameworks) and the engineers and researchers 
who will create the systems that can form a swarm. We believe that this is best done not through 
a lengthy definition of the term itself, but by instead (1) considering various relevant aspects 
(such as human control, inter-swarm communication, and localization) and (2) mapping 
prominent use-cases to them. The resulting clusters will be meaningful fragments of the full 
space the term swarming inhabits. 
This paper / talk will propose a methodology to achieve such an understanding.