Tactical Swarming: Applying Individual Vehicle Intelligence to Coordinated Effects

Jon Fink, Chief Technology Officer

Monday, March 17, 2025

In air and at sea, large numbers of individually simple agents can be brought together in an autonomous swarm to achieve collective behaviors. These environments—blue skies and open oceans—allow for operationally relevant coordination without the need for high individual intelligence.

Ground autonomy presents a fundamentally different challenge. The terrain is unpredictable, obstacles are abundant, and autonomous movement requires a higher level of local decision-making. Effective ground-based swarming, or “tactical swarming,” demands intelligent individual agents capable of understanding their environment and responding in agile ways. This distinction reshapes how we think about multi-agent autonomy in ground operations and why traditional approaches from air and sea cannot simply be applied to land.

Autonomous ground systems have long been constrained by rigid tasking and reliance on pre-mapped environments, limiting their ability to adapt to the battlefield in real time. Tactical swarming requires multiple autonomous ground vehicles, each with their own intelligence, to coordinate dynamically and achieve a collective mission effect. Overland AI is leading this charge with scalable real-world autonomy through OverDrive, our proprietary software stack. We have demonstrated autonomy that performs in complex cross-country terrain. This capability is more than an advantage; it is a necessity. Without it, one cannot credibly explore the space of operationally relevant ground autonomy.

OverDrive: Individual Vehicle Intelligence as Tactical Superiority

OverDrive is the core of tactical swarming. Unlike off-road ground autonomy to date, which traditionally has clung to trails and paths, OverDrive allows vehicles to traverse any terrain, including those that are truly off-road. This level of autonomy is the key to battlefield advantage. Each robot can react to emerging threats and opportunities, adapting to the environment rather than being constrained by prior maps or waiting for commands from a centralized operator. With OverDrive, uncrewed vehicles become a force multiplier rather than a limiting factor.

True autonomy presents a new challenge: coordination. Tactical swarming requires sophisticated, low-bandwidth communication and decentralized decision-making that does not expose forces to threats of electronic warfare. Routes can be variable and difficult to predict ahead of time, which makes it harder to coordinate vehicles. This challenge emerges because the input to the system is under-parameterized; a sparse set of coordinates for vehicle movement is insufficient to capture the breadth of operator intent. The OverDrive system is built to address this by exposing more details about how the vehicle should move through the environment.

OverWatch: Command and Control in Contested Environments

Communication is never guaranteed in combat: GPS can be jammed, and networks can be disrupted. The ability to operate effectively under these conditions is the defining challenge of deploying autonomous systems in real-world combat environments. OverDrive directly addresses lost communication links by enabling ground systems to function without constant operator oversight. However, battlefield advantage requires command and control for autonomous ground platforms to bridge the gap between human intent and machine execution, particularly in these contested environments where communication is unreliable.

We developed OverWatch, a tactical command and control (C2) interface that intuitively translates high-level operator intent into autonomous action, to enable ground platforms to execute missions with minimal intervention. Each platform receives the instructions it needs to locally interpret mission intent, share time-sensitive data, and adjust tactics in response to emerging threats. All of this happens with embedded decision-making to coordinate action without centralized control. This capability shifts ground autonomy from basic movement to deliberate maneuver and allows teams to adapt dynamically, even when communication links are degraded or lost. The combination of OverDrive and OverWatch transforms a theoretical advantage into an operational reality, providing commanders with a reliable force multiplier in the most demanding conditions.

Scaling Beyond Proof of Concept: Multi-Robot Coordination at the Next Level

Traditional approaches to swarming at a large scale are based on nearest-neighbor control laws with rapid streams of messages between nearby agents. However, unnecessary communication ultimately increases risk and exposes systems to electronic warfare threats—communication must be parsimonious. Overland AI’s approach to tactical swarming based on intelligent local behaviors ensures that every interaction between vehicles serves a clear operational purpose, avoiding the noise and inefficiency that limit traditional swarming techniques. This capability facilitates military strategy such as surprise for commanders to transform impossible ground conditions into operational dominance.

Building intelligent behaviors into each agent allows them to navigate complex terrain autonomously while maintaining alignment with mission objectives. This intelligence will enable vehicles to take on flexible roles, shifting between reconnaissance, perimeter security, and direct engagement as needed. Rather than following predetermined paths or relying on centralized commands, each agent understands its role within the larger mission and adapts accordingly. To that end, coordination for tactical swarming is event-driven and expressed in the operational language of OverWatch. Instead of relying on constant operator input, vehicles interpret high-level intent and adjust behavior in response to mission events.

Scaling autonomous ground forces requires more than simply increasing the number of vehicles in a formation. Overland AI is developing a framework that enables multi-robot coordination to scale from small teams to large autonomous formations without introducing bottlenecks or fragility. In the next fight, the side that masters autonomous ground swarming first has the advantage. By integrating OverDrive’s distributed intelligence with OverWatch’s event-based coordination, Overland AI is delivering the first scalable, tactically relevant swarming capability for autonomous ground forces.