On April 11, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will kick off an effort to make the Defense Department’s existing unmanned systems act more like squadrons of manned aircraft. The program, called Collaborative Operations in Denied Environments (CODE), seeks to turn drones into autonomous, cooperative swarms that share sensor data, help each other evade or overwhelm defenses, and respond to the will of a single human as one.

“Collaborative autonomy has the potential to significantly increase the capabilities of [existing drones] as well as to reduce the cost of future systems by composing heterogeneous teams of [drones] that can leverage the capabilities of each asset without having to duplicate or integrate capabilities into a single platform,” DARPA officials wrote in a notice for the kick-off “proposer’s day” for the CODE project. “Using collaboration algorithms, [drones] can provide services to each other, such as geolocating targets with long-distance sensors and guiding less-capable systems within their sensor range, providing multimodal sensors and diverse observation angles to improve target identification, transmitting critical information through the network...[and] protecting each other by overwhelming defenses and other stratagems.”

CODE seeks to develop four “critical technology areas” for drones:

Individual autonomy, or the ability for an aircraft to fly itself and manage its onboard systems without direct human control

A human-systems interface that allows a “mission commander” to stay on top of where drones are, what’s happening around them, and the progress of the mission; it will also provide the ability to change the mission while in progress and handle “critical inputs” like telling drones to fire weapons

Team-level autonomy, like creating a sort of hive intelligence among drones that gives them a single common view of the world and the ability to task each “member” of the team to jobs they’re best suited for

An open architecture that allows all of these components to plug together and pass collaborative information between machines and humans

The goal of these capabilities is to make it possible for drones to operate in more hostile environments than the skies over countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, where drones were able to largely fly with impunity in the past. In future conflicts, the enemy could have better air defenses, and drones could be called on to attack more “hardened” targets than the insurgents they’ve largely faced so far.

By flying in cooperative groups, a high-flying surveillance drone could feed targeting information to smaller, less expensive weapons-carrying drones to go after targets and give a commander the ability to control all of them from a single console.