A pack of U.S. Navy autonomous "swarm boats," or autonomous robot boats, collaborated among themselves to identify, surround and attack an enemy ship without human intervention in another chilling demonstration of how far and deadly intelligent war machines have become.

The successful test conducted by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) used four rigid hull inflatable boats (RHIBs) to illustrate the combat capability of swarm boats (also called swarmbots)  to patrol, investigate approaching unknown sea craft and relay that information back to a human operator.

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ONR contends autonomous swarm boats are more effective at mundane and boring naval tasks such as harbor patrols. The robots are also cheaper to operate and remove the need to send anywhere from two to five sailors into harm's way to investigate a suspicious vessel.

After the test, ONR said navy swarm boats can now execute more complex operations to defeat a wider variety of threats. The test was further validation of ONR's Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing (CARACaS).

Whereas in previous tests, the swarm boats needed a human operator to tell them what ship to attack, the latest one left it to the swarm boats to identify the threat vessel on their own and take corresponding action.

 The human-free capability first tested in October demonstrated several new capabilities that will "open up the aperture" for more missions.

One capability is "enhanced vessel classification," or the smart boats' ability to separate friend from foe using images fed into CARACaS. This is a staggering achievement in swarm robotics.

"We looked at a relatively large number of automated target recognition approaches...taking algorithms for (automated target recognition) and using them in our maritime environment was not straightforward," said ONR program manager Robert Brizzolara.

"In the end, we finally came up with an approach that works very well."

Swarm boats can also evaluate potential threats based on the behaviors exhibited by these threats.

ONR first demonstrated swarm boats in 2014 in a test where 13 robot boats out on Virginia's James River to were tasked to protect a large, high-value ship on the James River. The experiment proved  swarm boats could move independently of one another yet coordinate well enough to swarm a threatening vessel and escort it away from a friendly one.

A video of swarm boats can be viewed here.

Tagsswarm boats, autonomous swarm boats, U.S. Navy, Office of naval research, ONR, Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing, CARACaS