Telecom Bretagne, and its spin-off company Deev Interaction, were selected by the French General Directorate of Armament (DGA) to present a new device for simultaneous control of a swarm of surveillance drones on the ministry of Defence stand at the Salon du Bourget 2011 (June 19 to 26).

Visualization of the different action zones for drones on a touch table

Telecom Bretagne, and its spin-off company Deev Interaction, were selected by the French General Directorate of Armament (DGA) to present a new device for simultaneous control of a swarm of surveillance drones on the ministry of Defence stand at the Salon du Bourget 2011 (June 19 to 26).

Operated from a Diamondtouch touch table, approximately 1m in diagonal, the application uses algorithms bio-inspired by the behaviors of social insects and suggests ways of interaction and intuitive visualization to reduce the difficulties of manipulating such a complex system.
Four people can interact naturally to define areas to be monitored or, conversely, to avoid and decide on resource allocations necessary to meet mission objectives.

Civilian and military applications

The system can be used for reconnaissance over land or military intervention during civil protection interventions: forest fires, chemical based fires, nuclear incidents … The systems used so far only make it possible to control a limited number of UAVs in simple operations using inefficient traditional handling, of little interest for operators.

In this context, the project proposes a new paradigm of human-computer interaction and opens the way for a series of studies aimed at the integration of these mechanisms in systems on the 2020 horizon. Known as Susie (Supervision of swarm intelligence), the project is funded by the DGA within the framework of the REI (Exploratory Research and Innovation) project and in collaboration with the Loria Laboratory for Computer Research in Nancy .