AFRL image of weapons swarms

AFRL image of autonomous swarming munitions

WASHINGTON: Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is shifting the focus of its Golden Horde program from testing its own swarming weapons to developing a digital environment, nicknamed Colosseum, to test vendors bringing their own concepts.

“What we are looking to do is beginning a phase of an open, collaborative autonomy architecture, and this government-owned reference architecture is really going to be an environment where more players can come and compete their own versions of what autonomous collaborative weapons should be,” AFRL Director Brig. Gen. Heather Pringle said last week during the Air Force Association’s annual winter meeting.

The move follows the second flight test Feb. 19 of AFRL’s in-house developed Collaborative Small Diameter Bomb (CSDB). The test, AFRL announced today, involved four of the CSDBs, which feature data links to communicate, chose targets (based on pre-programmed algorithms) and coordinate strikes against an array of targets, independently from the human pilot.

The first test, held Dec. 15, 2020, failed to meet all its flight objectives, so the second test utilized improved software, the press release explained.

Four Collaborative Small Diameter Bombs (CSDBs) hang from the wing of an F-16 fighter from the Air Force Test Center’s 96th Test Wing at Eglin AFB. Two of the bombs were dropped during the first flight demonstration of the Air Force Golden Horde Vanguard.

Four Collaborative Small Diameter Bombs (CSDBs) hang from the wing of an F-16 fighter from the Air Force Test Center’s 96th Test Wing at Eglin AFB. Two of the bombs were dropped during the first flight demonstration of the Air Force Golden Horde Vanguard.

CSDB is essentially a souped-up version of Boeing’s Small Diameter Bomb that the Air Force has in abundance. AFRL and prime contractor Scientific Applications & Research Associates (SARA) led the development, with SARA providing the seeker for finding adversary GPS jammers. “Supporting contractors included L3Harris providing the Banshee 2 networked software defined radio, Georgia Tech Research Institute with the radio antenna, collaborative autonomy processor and algorithms, and The Boeing Company integrating the new technologies into its SDB-I weapons,” the AFRL press release elaborated.

The end goal of Golden Horde, which is one of AFRL’s high-priority Vanguard programs, is to increase the combat fire power of Air Force fighter jets. This helps explain the service’s desire to explore as many options for new weapons as possible.

Pringle actually foreshadowed the shift in the Golden Horde program in a presentation to the Mitchell Institute in early February. While providing few details at the time, she said the lab and the Air Force’s Program Executive Office for Weapons, led by Brig. Gen. Heath Collins, had been reassessing what the “deliverables” of the program should be.

“A major component of that is building a digital architecture that will allow more testing of various kinds of collaborative technologies, and building in some containerized [software] solutions that could be more plug-and-play across weapons,” she said.

That new digital environment is called Colosseum, the AFRL release said. “The Colosseum will be a fully integrated simulation environment with weapon digital twins, or a real-world weapon and a virtual clone, to more rapidly test, demonstrate, improve and transition collaborative autonomous networked technologies.”

While AFRL will hold a final flight test for CSDB this spring, it canceled the rest of the Golden Horde live test program. The lab had planned to also hold an initial flight demonstration for the Collaborative Miniature Air Launched Decoy (CMALD), followed by a ‘capstone’ test integrating the two bombs this fall.

Georgia Tech Applied Research Corporation (GTARC) was the prime integrator for the CMALD.