The U.S. Navy has patented a new software system called SWARM-Tac that can help ships decide to evade or destroy swarms of small boats like those used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy in the Persian Gulf.
Matt Ward, researcher at the Naval Surface Warfare Center-Port Hueneme Division, developed the SWARM-Tac software, which is now protected by U.S. Patent 10,281,281.
“Some of our adversaries use lots of small boats to kind of harass our ships,” Ward said. “While we have a single, high-capability ship, they will have a lot of these small craft that may not have as [powerful] weapons, but just a significant number of them. What [we’re] trying to do is use machine learning and artificial intelligence to generate tactics for the ship to maximize its probability of success against that type of an attack.”