U.S. naval researchers are relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to help larger navy ships thwart swarming attacks from groups of smaller enemy vessels.

Matt Ward, a researcher with the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Port Hueneme, California, has been developing AI-driven software called Swarm-Tac, to prevent such attacks. The AI software relies on radar and other sensor data from technology already employed on Navy ships to give sailors situational awareness surrounding the ship.

The software also informs the user about the ship itself, including information about the number of attackers and available weapons onboard. The AI software turns that data into solutions for evading or destroying the swarms, as well estimating the success rates of the strategies.

On occasion, Navy vessels have encountered swarms of smaller enemy boats. Though Navy cruisers, littoral combat ships and destroyers are powerful, they are less agile and not designed to fight several boats at once. Dozens of more small boats working together is threatening, as each of the smaller boats might be carrying large weapons caches.

"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."

When tested at sea, the software, which is still in the development phase, performed with encouraging results.