On March 15, the US Navy launched a torpedo-shaped robot into the Persian Gulf from the back of a helicopter. The robot was a Slocum glider, an uncrewed sensing tool that can collect data on ocean conditions below the surface. Dropping it from a helicopter was a proof of concept, a test towards expanding the array of vehicles that can put the robots into the water. As the US Navy seeks to know more about the waterways it patrols, distributing data collection tools can provide a more complete image of the ocean without straining the existing pool of sailors.

The US Navy helicopter, part of Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron (HM) 15, delivered the glider by flying low and slow over the sea surface. The glider, held between railings facing seaward, slid forward, diving but not tumbling into the water. The setup enabled smooth entry into the water, keeping the robot from falling aft over teakettle.

“We are excited to be a part of another series of firsts! In this instance, the first launch from a helicopter and the first-ever successful glider deployment from an aircraft,” Thomas Altshuler, a senior VP at Teledyne, said in a release. While the test took place in March, it was only recently announced by both the Navy and Teledyne, makers of the Slocum glider. “Teledyne Marine​ takes pride in our continued innovation and support of the U.S. Navy as it expands the operational envelope of underwater gliders.”

This is what that entry looked like:

A second video, which appears to be recorded by the phone camera of one of the sailors standing next to the rail, offers a different angle on the descent. The mechanics of the rail mount are clearer, from the horseshoe-shaped brace holding the glider in place, to the mechanism of release. When the glider hits water, it makes a splash, big at the moment then imperceptible in the wake of the rotor wash on the ocean surface.

For this operation, Teledyne says the glider was outfitted with “Littoral Battlespace Sensing – Glider (LBS-G) mine countermeasures (MCM) sensors.” In plain language, that means sensors designed to work near the shore, and to collect information about the conditions of the sea where the Navy is operating. This data is used by both the Navy for informing day-to-day operation and by the Naval Oceanographic Office, for understanding ocean conditions and informing both present and future operations.

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

In addition to HM 15, the test was coordinated with the aforementioned Naval Oceanographic Office, which regularly uses glider robots to collect and share oceanographic data. The Slocum glider is electrically powered, with range and endurance dependent upon battery type. At a minimum, that means the glider can travel 217 miles over 15 days, powerlessly gliding at an average speed of a little over 1 mph. (Optional thruster power doubles the speed to 2 mph.) With the most extensive power, Teledyne boasts that the gliders can range over 8,000 miles under water, stay in operation for 18 months, and work from shallows of 13 feet to depths of 3,280 feet.

“Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command directs and oversees more than 2,500 globally-distributed military and civilian personnel who collect, process, and exploit environmental information to assist Fleet and Joint Commanders in all warfare areas to make better decisions faster than the adversary,” notes the Navy description of the test.

Communicating that data from an underwater robot to the rest of the Navy is done through radio signals, satellite uplink, and acoustic communication, among other methods. These methods allow the glider to transmit data and receive commands from remote human operators. 

“The invention of gliders addressed a long-standing problem in physical oceanography: how do you measure changes in the ocean over long periods of time?” reads an Office of Navy Research history of the program. The Slocum gliders themselves date back to a concept floated in 1989, where speculative fiction imagined hundreds of autonomous floats surveying the ocean by 2021. The prototype glider was first developed in 1991, had sea trials in 1998, and today according to that report,the Naval Oceanographic Office alone operates more than 150 gliders.

This information is useful generally, as it builds a comprehensive picture of the vast seas on which fleets operate. It is also specifically useful, as listening for acoustics underwater can help detect other ships and submarines. Undersea mines, hidden from the surface, can be found through sensing the sea, and revealing their location protects Navy ships, sailors, and commercial ocean traffic, too.

Releasing the gliders from helicopters expands how and where these exploratory machines can start operations, hastening deployment for the undersea watchers. When oceans are battlefields, knowing the condition of the waters first can make all the difference.

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In April, the Air Force took its Angry Kitten out for a spin in the skies above Nevada. The feline-monikered system is a tool of electronic warfare, developed originally to simulate enemy systems in testing and training. Now, the Air Force is exploring using the system as an offensive tool, and as a weapon it can bring to future fights. This testing included putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone.

Electronic warfare is an increasingly important part of how modern militaries fight. The systems generally operate on the electromagnetic spectrum outside the range of visible light, making their actions perceived primarily by their resulting negative effects on an adversary, like lost signals or incorrect sensor information. What makes Angry Kitten especially valuable as a training tool, and as a future weapon, is that it uses a software-defined radio to adjust frequencies, perceiving and then mimicking other aircraft, and overall making a fussy mess of their signals.

“Electronic Attack on the MQ-9 is a compelling capability,” said Michael Chmielewski, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron commander, in a release. “15 hours of persistent noise integrated with a large force package will affect an adversary, require them to take some form of scalable action to honor it, and gets at the heart of strategic deterrence.”

In other words, putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone means that the jamming system can be airborne for a long time, as Reapers are long-endurance drones. Any hostile air force looking to get around the jamming will need to attack the Reaper, which as an uncrewed plane is more expendable than a crewed fighter. Or, it means they will need to route around the jammed area, letting the Air Force dictate the terms of where and how a fight takes place.

Reapers were developed for and widely used during the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars saw the drones’ long endurance, slow speed, and ability to loiter over an area as valuable assets, especially since the drones rarely had to contend with any anti-air missiles. They were operating in, to use Pentagon parlance, “uncontested” skies. As the Pentagon looks to the future, one in which it may be called upon to use existing equipment in a war against nations with fighter jets and sophisticated anti-air systems, it’d be easy to see Reapers sidelined as too slow, vulnerable, or irrelevant for the task.

Putting an Angry Kitten on a Reaper is a way to make the drone relevant again for other kinds of war.

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

“The goal is to expand the mission sets the MQ-9 can accomplish,” said Aaron Aguilar, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron assistant director of operations, in the same release. “The proliferation and persistence of MQ-9s in theater allows us to fill traditional platform capability gaps that may be present. Our goal is to augment assets that already fill this role so they can focus and prioritize efforts in areas they are best suited for.”

Putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper turns a counter-insurgency hunter-killer into a conventional-war surveillance platform and jammer. It emphasizes what the tool on hand can already do well, while giving it a different set of ways to interact with a different expected array of foes. 

An earlier exercise this spring saw the Air National Guard test landing and launching a Reaper from a highway in Wyoming, expanding how and where it can operate. The ability to quickly deploy, refuel, rearm, and relaunch Reapers, from found runways as well as established bases, can expand how the drones are used.

In addition to testing the Angry Kitten with Reapers, the Air Force tested the Angry Kitten in Alaska on F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolts, both older planes originally designed for warfare against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In the decades since, Fighting Falcons—known more colloquially as vipers—have expanded to become a widely used versatile fighter in the arsenal of the US and a range of nations. Meanwhile, the Air Force has long worked to retire the A-10s, arguing that they lack protection against modern weapons. That process began in earnest this spring, with the oldest models selected for the boneyard.

In the meantime, putting the Angry Kitten on drones and planes still in service means expanding not just what those planes can do, but potentially how effective they can be against sophisticated weapons. Targeting systems, from those used by planes to find targets to those used by missiles to track them, can be disrupted or fooled by malicious signals. An old plane may not be able to survive a hit from a modern missile, but jamming a missile so that misses its mark is better protection than any armor.

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In the desert plain south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and just north of the Isleta Pueblo reservation, the Air Force defeated a swarm of drones with THOR, a powerful microwave weapon. THOR, or the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, is designed to defend against drone swarms, frying electronics at scale in a way that could protect against many flying robots at once.

THOR has been in the works for years, with a successful demonstration in February 2021 at Kirtland Air Force Base, south of Albuquerque. From 2021 to 2022, THOR was also tested overseas. 

This latest demonstration, which took place on April 5, saw the microwave face off against a swarm of multiple flying uncrewed aerial vehicles. The event took place at the Chestnut Range, short for “Conventional High Explosives & Simulation Test,” which has long been used by the Air Force Research Lab for testing.

“The THOR team flew numerous drones at the THOR system to simulate a real-world swarm attack,” said Adrian Lucero, THOR program manager at AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate, in a release earlier this month. “THOR has never been tested against these types of drones before, but this did not stop the system from dropping the targets out of the sky with its non-kinetic, speed-of-light High-Power Microwave, or HPM pulses,” he said.

Crucial to THOR’s concept and operation is that the weapon disables and defeats drones without employing explosive or concussive power, the kind derived from rockets, missiles, bombs, and bullets. The military lumps these technologies together as “kinetics,” and they make up the bread and butter of how the military uses force. Against drones, which can cost mere hundreds or even thousands of dollars per vehicle, missiles represent an expensive form of ammunition. While the bullets used in existing counter-rocket weapons are much cheaper than missiles, they still create the problem of dangerous debris everywhere they don’t hit. Using microwaves means that only the damaged drone itself becomes a falling danger, without an added risk from the tools used to shoot it down.

“THOR was extremely efficient with a near continuous firing of the system during the swarm engagement,” Capt. Tylar Hanson, THOR deputy program manager, said in a release. “It is an early demonstrator, and we are confident we can take this same technology and make it more effective to protect our personnel around the world.”

The THOR system fits into a broader package of directed energy countermeasures being used to take on small, cheap, and effective drones. Another directed energy weapon explored for this purpose is lasers, which can burn through a drone’s hull and circuitry, but that approach takes time to hold focus on and melt a target.

“The system uses high power microwaves to cause a counter electronic effect. A target is identified, the silent weapon discharges in a nanosecond and the impact is instantaneous,” reads an Air Force fact sheet about the weapon. In a video from AFRL, THOR is described as a “low cost per shot, speed of light solution,” which uses “a focused beam of energy to defeat drones at a large target area.”

An April 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office is much more straightforward: A High Power Microwave uses “energy to affect electronics by overwhelming critical components intended to carry electrical currents such as circuit boards, power systems, or sensors. HPM systems engage targets over an area within its wider beam and can penetrate solid objects.”

Against commercial or cheaply produced drones, the kind most likely to see use on the battlefield in great numbers today, microwaves may prove to be especially effective. While THOR is still a ways from development into a fieldable weapon, the use of low-cost drones on the battlefield has expanded tremendously since the system started development. A report from RUSI, a British think tank, found that in its fight against Russia’s invasion, “Ukrainian UAV losses remain at approximately 10,000 per month.”

While that illustrates the limits of existing drone models, it also highlights the scale of drones seeing use in regular warfare. As drone technology improves, and militaries move from adapting commercial drones to dedicated military models made close to commercial cost and scale, countering those drones en masse will likely be a greater priority for militaries. In that, weapons like THOR offer an alternative to existing countermeasures, one that promises greater effects at scale.

Watch a video about THOR, which also garnered a Best of What’s New award from PopSci in 2021, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, below:

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Wing, Google parent company Alphabet’s drone-delivery subsidiary, pulled off a fun demonstration delivery earlier this month: one of its drones delivered beer and peanuts to Coors Field, the Colorado Rockies’ stadium in the middle of Denver. While this novel first comes with a heavy dose of caveats, it still gives a nice glimpse of how far some drone delivery operations have come over the past few years. 

What are the caveats? According to Wing, the drone delivered a small package of beer (“Coors of course”) and peanuts to the outfield area of Coors Field during the opening party for the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s (AIVSI) annual autonomous systems conference. There were apparently 1,000 people in the stands, though as you can see in the video, it was no game day crowd. Crucially, Wing wasn’t using its drones to deliver beers and peanuts on demand—this was purely a demonstration flight to show the drone operating in a downtown urban environment. 

“Our drones will never match the experience of flagging down a vendor and having them toss peanuts to you from 20 seats away. Nor do we think delivering during game day is a particularly compelling use-case for our technology,” writes Jonathan Bass, Wing’s head of marketing and communications in the blog post announcing the feat. “We’re more focused on supplementing existing methods of ground-based delivery to move small packages more efficiently across miles, not feet.”

And Coors Field was a suitable environment to show just how capable its drones have become. Over the past few years, the former moonshot has progressed from delivering to rural farms and lightly populated suburbs to flying packages around denser suburbs and large metro areas like Dallas-Forth Worth in Texas. As Bass explains it, despite Wing having done 1,000 deliveries on some days in one of its Australian bases of operations, the company is still regularly asked if drone delivery could work in “dense, urban environments”.

“We chose Coors Field because it’s a particularly challenging environment,” writes Bass. “Coors Field sits in the middle of Denver, Colorado—one of the fastest growing cities in America. Any professional sports stadium—with stadium seating, jumbotrons, and the like—makes for a fun challenge.”

The demonstration is all part of Wing’s plans to massively expand where it operates over the next while. Earlier this year, it announced the Wing Delivery Network. Drones in this program would work more like ride-sharing vehicles that picked up and dropped off packages as needed instead of operating from a single store or base. To make this possible, Wing unveiled a device called the AutoLoader. It sits in a parking spot outside a store and enables to staff to leave a package for a drone to autonomously collect. 

While things seem to be taking off for Wing, the scene is a bit more turbulent across the drone delivery industry. In particular, Amazon’s Prime Air is really struggling to launch. Despite first being unveiled almost a decade ago, Prime Air has now completed a total of “100 deliveries in two small US markets,” according to a report earlier this month by CNBC. The company apparently intended to reach 10,000 deliveries this year, but has had to revise those projections. It probably doesn’t help that a significant number of workers were laid off earlier this year.

Other companies are having more success. Zipline, best known for delivering medical supplies by parachute in rural Africa from catapult-launched fixed-wing drones, recently showcased a new platform that would allow it to deliver more typical packages—like a Sweetgreen salad—by lowering them on a tether from a hover-capable drone. It, along with DroneUp and Flytrex, have partnered with Walmart and collectively completed more than 6,000 deliveries last year. The big question consumers have: Are delivery drones going to be everywhere in the next few years? Probably not, but they are likely to be more present. 

Watch the drone in action below:

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On April 30, an MQ-9 Reaper drone landed on Highway 287, north of Rawlins, Wyoming. The landing was planned; it was a part of Exercise Agile Chariot, which drew a range of aircraft and saw ground support provided by the Kentucky Air National Guard. While US aircraft have landed on highways before, this was the first time such a landing had been undertaken by a Reaper, and it demonstrates the continued viability of adapting roads into runways as the need arises. 

In a video showing the landing released by the Air Force, the Reaper’s slow approach is visible against the snow-streaked rolling hills and pale-blue sky of Wyoming in spring. The landing zone is inconspicuous, a stretch of highway that could be anywhere, except for the assembled crowds and vehicles marking this particular stretch of road as an impromptu staging ground for air operations. 

“The MQ-9 can now operate around the world via satellite launch and recovery without traditional launch and recovery landing sites and maintenance packages,” said Lt. Col. Brian Flanigan, 2nd Special Operations Squadron director of operations, in a release. “Agile Chariot showed once again the leash is off the MQ-9 as the mission transitions to global strategic competition.”

When Flanigan describes the Reaper as transitioning to “global strategic competition,” that’s alluding to the comparatively narrower role Reapers had over the last 15 years, in which they were a tool used almost exclusively for the counter-insurgency warfare engaged in by the United States over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as elsewhere, like Somalia and Yemen. Reapers’ advantages shine in counter-insurgency: The drones can fly high over long periods of time, watch in precise detail and detect small movements below, and drone pilots can pick targets as the opportunity arises.

But Reapers have hard limits that make their future uncertain in wars against militaries with substantial anti-air weapons, to say nothing of flying against fighter jets. Reapers are slow, propeller-driven planes, built for endurance not speed, and could be picked out of the sky or, worse, destroyed on a runway by a skilled enemy with dedicated anti-plane weaponry.

In March, a Reaper flying over the Black Sea was sprayed by fuel released from a Russian jet, an incident that led it to crash. While Wyoming’s Highway 287 is dangerous for cars, for planes it has the virtue of being entirely in friendly air space. 

Putting a Reaper into action in a war against a larger military, which in Pentagon terms often means against Russia or China, means finding a way to make the Reaper useful despite those threats. Such a mission would have to take advantage of the Reaper’s long endurance flight time, surveillance tools, and precision strike abilities, without leaving it overly vulnerable to attack. Operating on highways as runways is one way to overcome that limit, letting the drone fly from whenever there is road. 

“An adversary that may be able to deny use of a military base or an airfield, is going to have a nearly impossible time trying to defend every single linear mile of roads. It’s just too much territory for them to cover and that gives us access in places and areas that they can’t possibly defend,” Lt. Col. Dave Meyer, Deputy Mission Commander for Exercise Agile Chariot, said in a release.

Alongside the Reaper, the exercise showcased MC-130Js, A-10 Warthogs, and MH-6M Little Bird helicopters. With soldiers first establishing landing zones along the highway, the exercise then demonstrated landing the C-130 cargo aircraft to use as a refueling and resupply point for the A-10s, which also operated from the highway. Having the ability to not just land on an existing road, but bring more fuel and spare ammunition to launch new missions from the same road, makes it hard for an adversary to permanently ground planes, as resupply is also air-mobile and can use the same improvised runways.

Part of the exercise took place on Highway 789, which forks off 287 between Lander and Riverton, as the setting for trial search and rescue missions. “On the second day of operations, they repeated the procedure of preparing a landing zone for an MC-130. Once the aircraft landed, the team boarded MH-6 Little Birds that had been offloaded from the cargo plane by Soldiers from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The special tactics troops then performed combat search-and-rescue missions to find simulated injured pilots and extract them from the landing zone on Highway 789,” described the Kentucky Air National Guard, in a statement.

With simulated casualties on cleared roads, the Air Force rehearsed for the tragedy of future war. As volunteers outfitted in prosthetic injuries were transported back to the care and safety of landed transports, the highways in Wyoming were home to the full spectrum of simulated war from runways. Watch a video of the landing, below.

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Early in the morning of May 3, local Moscow time, a pair of explosions occurred above the Kremlin. Videos of the incident appeared to show two small drones detonating—ultramodern tech lit up against the venerable citadel. The incident was exclusively the domain of Russian social media for half a day, before Russian President Vladimir Putin declared it a failed assassination attempt.

What actually happened in the night sky above the Russian capital? It is a task being pieced together in public and in secret. Open-source analysts, examining the information available in the public, have constructed a picture of the event and video release, forming a good starting point.

Writing at Radio Liberty, a US-government-funded Russian-language outlet, reporters Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov point out that a video showing smoke above the Kremlin was published around 3:30 am local time on a Moscow Telegram channel. Twelve hours later, Putin released a statement on the attack, and then, write Dobrynin and Krutov, “several other videos of the night attack appeared, according to which Radio Liberty established that two drones actually exploded in the area of ​​​​the dome of the Senate Palace with an interval of about 16 minutes, arriving from opposite directions. The first caused a small fire on the roof of the building, the second exploded in the air.”

That the drones exploded outside a symbolic target, without reaching a practical one, could be by design, or it could owe to the nature of Kremlin air defense, which may have shot the drones down at the last moment before they became more threatening. 

Other investigations into the origin, nature, and means of the drone incident are likely being carried out behind the closed doors and covert channels of intelligence services. Without being privy to those conversations, and aware that information released by governments is only a selective portion of what is collected, it’s possible to instead answer a different set of questions: could drones do this? And why would someone use a drone for an attack like this?

To answer both, it is important to understand gimmick drones.

What’s a gimmick drone?

Drones, especially the models able to carry a small payload and fly long enough to travel a practical distance, can be useful tools for a variety of real functions. Those can include real-estate photography, crop surveying, creating videos, and even carrying small explosives in war. But drones can also carry less-useful payloads, and be used as a way to advertise something other than the drone itself, like coffee delivery, beer vending, or returning shirts from a dry cleaner. For a certain part of the 2010s, attaching a product to a drone video was a good way to get the media to write about it. 

What stands out about gimmick drones is not that they were doing something only a drone could do, but instead that the people behind the stunt were using a drone as a publicity technique for something else. In 2018, a commercial drone was allegedly used in an assassination attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, in which drones flew at Maduro and then exploded in the sky, away from people and without reports of injury. 

As I noted at the time about gimmick drones, “In every case, the drone is the entry point to a sales pitch about something else, a prelude to an ad for sunblock or holiday specials at a casual restaurant. The drone was always part of the theater, a robotic pitchman, an unmanned MC. What mattered was the spectacle, the hook, to get people to listen to whatever was said afterwards.”

Drones are a hard weapon to use for precision assassination. Compared to firearms, poisoning, explosives in cars or buildings, or a host of other attacks, drones represent a clumsy and difficult method. Wind can blow the drones off course, they can be intercepted before they get close, and the flight time of a commercial drone laden with explosives is in minutes, not hours.

What a drone can do, though, is explode in a high-profile manner.

Why fly explosive-laden drones at the  Kremlin?

Without knowing the exact type of drone or the motives of the drone operator (or operators), it is hard to say exactly why one was flown at and blown up above one of Russia’s most iconic edifices of state power. Russia’s government initially blamed Ukraine, before moving on to attribute the attack to the United States. The United States denied involvement in the attack, and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said to take any Russian claims with “a very large shaker of salt.”

Asked about the news, Ukraine’s President Zelensky said the country fights Russia on its own territory, not through direct attacks on Putin or Moscow. The war has seen successful attacks on Putin-aligned figures and war proponents in Russia, as well as the family of Putin allies, though attribution for these attacks remains at least somewhat contested, with the United States attributing at least one of them to Ukrainian efforts.

Some war commentators in the US have floated the possibility that the attack was staged by Russia against Russia, as a way to rally support for the government’s invasion. However, that would demonstrate that Russian air defenses and security services are inept enough to miss two explosive-laden drones flying over the capital and would be an unusual way to argue that the country is powerful and strong. 

Ultimately, the drone attackers may have not conducted this operation to achieve any direct kill or material victory, but as a proof of concept, showing that such attacks are possible. It would also show that claims of inviolability of Russian airspace are, at least for small enough flying machines and covert enough operatives, a myth. 

In that sense, the May 3 drone incident has a lot in common with the May 1987 flight of Mathias Rust, an amateur pilot in Germany who safely flew a private plane into Moscow and landed it in Red Square, right near the Kremlin. Rust’s flight ended without bloodshed or explosions, and took place in a peacetime environment, but it demonstrated the hollowness of the fortress state whose skies he flew through.

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Best overall		DJI FPV drone		SEE IT	It flies fast and far with DJI’s proven technologies.
Best for video		DJI Avata		SEE IT	The 4K camera offers exceptional stabilization for stunning shots.
Best budget		Ryze Tello		SEE IT	Get up in the air without spending a sky high amount of cash.

If you’ve seen incredible aerobatic video footage lately, there’s a good chance it was created with an FPV drone. Short for “first-person view,” FPV drones stream a live video feed back to a pilot’s headset, so it looks like they’re actually in a tiny cockpit. This view offers unprecedented control and enables high-performance feats like drone racing or truly harrowing video capture. In doing so, these FPV drones allow you to experience the world around you in ways you may never have thought possible, except perhaps in a video game. While the drone world has grown significantly in recent years, we’ve narrowed down this list of the best FPV drones to get you airborne with minimal fuss.

• Best overall: DJI FPV combo
• Best for beginners: BetaFPV Cetus Pro 
• Best for kids: DEERC D20 Mini Drone for Kids 
• Best for video: DJI Avata 
• Best budget: Ryze Tello

How we chose the best FPV drone

Although one of the key brands in the drone market has been DJI, which is also true of FPV drones as well, we just didn’t limit our search to DJI FPV drones. We studied models from other brands as well. One characteristic we looked for from all models was if the drone was easy to use. We also tried to select models that were relatively durable. However, for some, like those racing FPV drones, there might not be many models that can last a long time in that environment. But by and large, we looked for models that could survive a few crashes. Another factor in selecting the models was considering the drone’s overall design, including its structural design and ergonomics and how it operated with its mobile app and other accessories. 

The best FPV drones: Reviews & Recommendations

Drones have a rather large price range. Some more toy-like FPV drones can cost less than $100, while others can cost well over $1,000. That means you’ll want to find out not only how much money you want to spend but also what features are important to you and how you intend to be using the FPV drone. 

Best overall: DJI FPV combo

DJI

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: Its mix of advanced features and ease of use make it the best pick for those who don’t mind spending some money upfront.

Specs

• Dimensions: 12.2 x 10 x 5 inches
• Weight: 1.8 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: 1080p resolution at 120/fps; 4K resolution at 60/fps
• Camera Resolution: 12 megapixels
• Maximum Flying Time: 20 minutes 

Pros

• Fast: Can fly as fast as 87 mph 
• Fun, easy to use, and versatile
• Shoots good quality video and photos
• Nice selection of safety features

Cons

• For the price, battery life could be better
• Not as durably constructed as some other models 

The first thing some drone races look for when buying a racing drone is its top speed. And this model clearly stands out among FPV drones as it can fly as fast as 87 mph. But the DJI FPV stands out in other ways, too. For instance, take the price: This new kit from DJI provides everything you need to start flying in truly FPV fashion: In addition to the drone, you also get the DJI FPV goggles V2 (which are comfortable to wear and use), a remote control and the new motion controller, and more. That offers you a lot of value for the money. In addition, it can fly in three different flight modes, depending on your skill level, and also comes with a number of useful safety features, including the emergency “brake and hover” mode. Simply press a button on the controller. The drone will stop and hover stably within a few seconds.

The imaging and video specs are also quite good: You can shoot video with 4K resolution (at 60 fps) or 1080 resolution (at 120 fps, which can be useful for slow-motion video) at a very wide 150° field of view. You can also shoot 12-megapixel resolution photos. Plus, the done system includes collision technology to prevent it from crashing. Overall, this DJI combo kit provides a powerful immersive experience. 

Best for beginners: BetaFPV Cetus Pro 

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This is a great model to learn the basics of flying an FPV drone.

Specs

• Dimensions: 4.6 x 4.6 x 1.3 inches
• Weight: 0.1 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: N/A 
• Camera Resolution: N/A
• Maximum Flying Time: 4-5 minutes 

Pros

• A great FPV drone to learn on
• Easy to use
• It has a sturdy design yet is lightweight
• Comes with clever features to keep you flying 

Cons

• The included VR02 FPV goggles do not support video record function. 

Although this model is meant for beginners, it includes all the necessary elements for learning how to use an FPV drone: The Cetus Pro FPV kit includes the brushless quadcopter and a LiteRadio2 SE transmitter and VR02 FPV goggles. It’s lightweight but sturdy, and it also has an emergency battery and low-battery feature to avoid crashing the drone. Plus, there’s an altitude hold function, which lets that drone auto-hover. It even has a “turtle mode.” If the FPV drone has fallen to the ground and is now upside down, you can activate the “turtle mode” via the LiteRadio2 SE transmitter, and it will flip the Cetus Pro FPV back over to allow you to resume flying. Comes with three flight modes and flies at three different speeds.

One downside is that included VR02 FPV goggles do not support video record function. However, if you want to pay more, you can buy the VR03 FPV goggles, which do support video record function. Both the resolution for VR02 and VR03 FPV goggles are 480p.

Best for kids: DEERC D20 Mini Drone for Kids 

Deerc

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: A very inexpensive and fun FPV drone.

Specs

• Dimensions: 7 x 4.7 x 1.7 inches
• Weight: 0.1 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: 720p 
• Camera Resolution: 1 megapixel
• Maximum Flying Time: 10 minutes 

Pros

• Very inexpensive 
• Includes gesture control and voice commands

Cons

• Low-resolution video and photos
• Doesn’t connect with a pair of goggles 

If you’re looking for an inexpensive drone for an older child or teenager, consider this model. This mini drone comes with some useful features to help kids learn how to fly drones: It can auto-hover with its altitude hold system, and it’s easy to use with its one-key start/stop function. It also comes with 3-speed modes.  

However, some of the imaging features aren’t incredibly robust. Nevertheless, your kids might find them fun to play with. For instance, the onboard camera (which connects wirelessly to your smartphone and is where you see the streaming video) has only 720p HD video resolution. The photos are only 1280 x 720 resolution images, which is barely a 1-megapixel photo. But what is fun is that you can take photos and video clips via gesture control—if you make a victory or “V” sign with your fingers, the drone will capture a photo or video. It also has voice control: You can say “take off” or “landing” and the drone will respond accordingly.

Best for video: DJI Avata

DJI

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: When you’re looking for a FPV drone that will take better quality videos and photos 

Specs

• Dimensions: 7.1 x 7.1 x 3.1 inches
• Weight: 0.9 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: 2.7K resolution at 120/fps; 4K resolution at 60/fps
• Camera Resolution: 48 megapixels
• Maximum Flying Time: 18 minutes 

Pros

• Sturdy, compact construction 
• A larger sensor and more megapixels for better quality video and photos
• Includes image stabilization
• Nice selection of safety features

Cons

• Can’t fly as fast as the DJI FPV

An important question you’ll need to answer before you buy an FPV drone is what are you buying a drone for? If it’s to buy the fastest consumer FPV drone, then you’ll want to buy the DJI FPV drone. The Avata’s top speed is 60 mph, which is fast but not quite as fast as the DJI FPV, which can fly up to 87 mph. But if you’re looking to buy a drone that shoots much better video quality as well as photo quality, then the DJI Avata is the model you’ll want to consider: The Avata comes with a large, 48-megapixel 1/1.7-inch sensor, which is one of the reasons you get better quality photos and video. The lens has an f/2.8 aperture and shoots with a wide 155-degree field of view. The Avata also captures 4K video at up to 60fps or 2.7k video at up to 120fps if you want slow-motion video. 

Best budget: Ryze Tello

Tello

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Why it made the cut: For an easy-to-use, inexpensive FPV drone that’s less than $100 

Specs

• Dimensions: 3.7 x 3.7 x 1.6 inches 
• Weight: 0.2 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: 720p resolution video
• Camera Resolution: 5 megapixels
• Maximum Flying Time: 13 minutes 

Pros

• Very inexpensive
• Easy to use
• Compatible with VR headsets
• Uses hand gestures

Cons

• Controller costs extra
• Imaging resolution is a bit on the low side

For those on a budget, this model might fit the bill. It’s powered with technology by DJI, so it’s still pretty full-featured for such a low-priced drone. However, it doesn’t come with a controller, which is one reason it’s so inexpensive. But you can connect it to your phone using the mobile app or a supported Bluetooth remote controller (connected to the mobile app). It’s also compatible with VR headsets. Also, if you’re interested in learning how to code, or if you’d like to have your kids learn how to code, this drone can be programmed using Scratch–MIT’s coding system for kids to learn on. However, it would be nice if it had slightly high video and still photo resolution. 

Things to consider when shopping for the best FPV drones

There are many features to consider when buying an FPV drone. But you may find it helpful to start by asking yourself some questions: Are you experienced in flying drones or FPV drones? Are you buying this drone for a beginner or a teenager? Will you use them for racing, or are you more interested in shooting video or photos? 

Controls

One key area to consider when comparing drones is figuring out how easy it is to use the controls and the drone system. Some work by connecting to your smartphone, while others come with dedicated controllers. Do some research to see which one might be the best for you. If you’re doing serious flying, a dedicated controller is an absolute must. Higher-end models allow for controller customization to fit your specific flight style.

Camera

There are also big differences in how they record and capture video or photos. Some, like the BetaFPV Cetus Pro FPV drone, are meant for you to learn how to fly these drones. In other words, it doesn’t include the capability of recording video or capturing photos, since it was designed for beginners to learn on. But other pricier models give you the ability to capture 4K resolution video and 48mm still photos. Some custom models allow for swappable camera systems so that you can attach your own GoPro or another action camera to it.

FAQs

Final thoughts when buying the best FPV drones

• Best overall: DJI FPV combo
• Best for beginners: BetaFPV Cetus Pro 
• Best for kids: DEERC D20 Mini Drone for Kids 
• Best for video: DJI Avata 
• Best budget: Ryze Tello

Have you ever wondered if you could get motion sickness, which could make you feel lightheaded or even nauseous, from using goggles with an FPV drone? The answer to this question is “Yes!” The effect is similar to what you might experience when watching a VR experience through a VR headset. One of the theories about this sickness is that it’s a fairly common side effect caused by the brain’s struggle to square what you see with what you feel—your brain might think you’re flying like Superman over a building. Still, you’re just standing in the middle of your living room. If you experience motion sickness when using an FPV drone, consider taking a break from using the goggles for 15 or 20 minutes before you try using them again.  

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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On April 11, the Department of Defense announced that it was allocating just over $8 million for 21 new delivery drones. These flying machines, officially called the TRV-150C Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft Systems, are made by Survice Engineering in partnership with Malloy Aeronautics. 

The TRV-150C is a four-limbed drone that looks like a quadcopter on stilts. Its tall landing legs allow it to take off with a load of up to 150 pounds of cargo slung underneath. The drone’s four limbs each mount two rotors, making the vehicle more of an octocopter than a quadcopter. 

The TRV drone family also represents the successful evolution of a long-running drone development program, one that a decade ago promised hoverbikes for humans and today is instead delivering uncrewed delivery drones.

The contract award is through the Navy and Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems program office, which is focused on ensuring the people doing the actual fighting on the edge of combat or action get the exact robotic assistance they need. For Marines, this idea has been put into practice and not just theorized, with an exercise involving drone resupply taking place at Quantico, Virginia, at the end of March.

The Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft System (TRUAS), as the TRV-150C is referred to in use, “is designed to provide rapid and assured, highly automated aerial distribution to small units operating in contested environments; thereby enabling flexible and rapid emergency resupply, routine distribution, and a constant push and pull of material in order to ensure a constant state of supply availability,” said Master Sergeant Chris Genualdi in a release about the event. Genualdi already works in the field of airborne and air delivery, so the delivery drone became an additional tool to meet familiar problems.

Malloy Aeronautics boasts that the drone has a range of over 43 miles; in the Marines’ summary from Quantico, the drone is given a range of 9 miles for resupply missions. Both numbers can be accurate: Survice gives the unencumbered range of the TRV-150 at 45 miles, while carrying 150 pounds of cargo that range is reduced to 8 miles. 

With a speed of about 67 mph and a flight process that is largely automated, the TRV-150C is a tool that can get meaningful quantities of vital supplies where they are needed, when they are needed. Malloy also boasts that drones in the TRV-150 family have batteries that can be easily swapped, allowing for greater operational tempo as the drones themselves do not have to wait for a recharge before being sent on their next mission.

These delivery drones use “waypoint navigation for mission planning, which uses programmed coordinates to direct the aircraft’s flight pattern,” the Marines said in a release, with Genualdi noting “that the simplicity of operating the TRUAS is such that a Marine with no experience with unmanned aircraft systems can be trained to operate and conduct field level maintenance on it in just five training days.”

Reducing the complexity of the drone to essentially a flying cart that can autonomously deliver gear where needed is huge. The kinds of supplies needed in battle are all straightforward—vital tools like more bullets, more meals, or even more blood and medical equipment—so attempts at life-saving can be made even if it’s unsafe for the soldiers to move towards friendly lines for more elaborate care.

Getting the drone down to just a functional delivery vehicle comes after years of work. In 2014, Malloy debuted a video of a reduced scale hoverbike designed for a human to ride on, using four rotors and a rectangular body. En route to becoming the basis for the delivery drone seen today, the hoverbike was explored by the US Army as a novel way to fly scouts around. This scout ultimately moved to become a resupply tool, which the Army tested in January 2017.

In 2020, the US Navy held a competition for a range of delivery drones at the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona. The entry by Malloy and Survice came in first place, and cemented the TRV series as the drones to watch for battlefield delivery. In 2021, British forces used TRV drones in an exercise, with the drones tasked with delivering blood to the wounded. 

“This award represents a success story in the transition of technology from U.S. research laboratories into the hands of our warfighters,” said Mark Butkiewicz, a vice president at SURVICE Engineering, in a release. “We started with an established and proven product from Malloy Aeronautics and integrated the necessary tech to provide additional tactical functionality for the US warfighter. We then worked with research labs to conduct field experiments with warfighters to refine the use of autonomous unmanned multirotor drones to augment logistical operations at the forward most edge of the battlefield.”

The 21 drones awarded by the initial contract will provide a better start, alongside the drones already used for training, in teaching the Marines how to rely on robots doing resupply missions in combat. Genualdi expects the Marines to create a special specialty to support the use of drones, with commanders dispatching members to learn how to work alongside the drone.

The drones could also see life as exportation and rescue tools, flying through small gaps in trees, buildings, and rubble in order to get people the aid they need. In both peace and wartime uses, the drone’s merit is its ability to get cargo where it is needed without putting additional humans at risk of catching a bullet. 

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When entering into disaster scenarios, robots still have a major downside—their inability to recover when they inevitably crash into things. Scientists, however, have taken a page out of biology’s playbook, as they often do, to create a drone that can bounce back when met with various obstacles. 

Think of a bird landing on a tree branch—in order to do so, they likely have to collide with a few smaller branches or leaves in the process of touching down. But, their joints and soft tissues cushion these bumps along the way, and their feet are built precisely to lock themselves in place without straining a muscle. When a drone opts for a similar route, taking on a bunch of collisions on the way to their destination, it’s a little bit more dramatic. “They don’t recover; they crash,” Wenlong Zhang, an associate professor and robotics expert at Arizona State University said in a release. 

“We see drones used to assess damage from high in the sky, but they can’t really navigate through collapsed buildings,” Zhang added. “Their rigid frames compromise resilience to collision, so bumping into posts, beams, pipes or cables in a wrecked structure is often catastrophic.” 

Zhang is an author of a recent paper published in Soft Robotics wherein a team of scientists designed and tested a quadrotor drone with an inflatable frame, apparently the first of its kind. The inflatable frame acts almost like a blow-up suit, protecting the drone from any harsh consequences of banging into a wall or another obstacle. It also provides the kind of soft tissue absorption necessary for perching—the team’s next task.

[Related: Watch this bird-like robot make a graceful landing on its perch.]

After studying how birds land and grip onto branches with their taloned feet, the team developed a fabric-based bistable grasper for the inflatable drone. The grasper had two unpowered “resting states,” meaning it can remain open or closed without using energy, and reacts to impact of landing by closing its little feet and gripping hard onto a nearby object.

“It can perch on pretty much anything. Also, the bistable material means it doesn’t need an actuator to provide power to hold its perch. It just closes and stays like that without consuming any energy,” Zhang said in the release. “Then when needed, the gripper can be pneumatically retracted and the drone can just take off.”

A more resilient type of drone is crucial for search and rescue scenarios when the path forward may be filled with debris, but the authors could also see this kind of creation being useful in monitoring forest fires or even exploration on other planets.

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A worm’s brain may be teeny tiny, but that small organ has inspired researchers to design better software for drones. Using liquid neural networks, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have trained a drone to identify and navigate toward objects in varying environments. 

Liquid neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence tool, are unique. They can extrapolate and apply previous data to new environments. In other words, “they can generalize to situations that they have never seen,” Ramin Hasani, a research affiliate at MIT and one of the co-authors on a new study on the topic, says. The study was published in the journal Science Robotics on April 19. 

Neural networks are software inspired by how neurons interact in the brain. The type of neural network examined in this study, liquid neural networks, can adapt flexibly in real-time when given new information—hence the name “liquid.” 

[Related: This tiny AI-powered robot is learning to explore the ocean on its own]

The researchers’ network was modeled after a 2-millimeter-long worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. Naturally, it has a small brain: 302 neurons and 8,000 synaptic connections, allowing researchers to understand the intricacies of neural connections. A human brain, by contrast, has an estimated 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. 

“We wanted to model the dynamics of neurons, how they perform, how they release information, one neuron to another,” Hasani says.

These robust networks enable the drone to adapt in real-time, even after initial training, allowing it to identify a target object despite changes in their environment. The liquid neural networks yielded a success rate of over 90 percent in reaching their target in varying environments and demonstrated flexible decision-making.

Using this technology, people might be able to accomplish tasks such as automating wildlife monitoring and search and rescue missions, according to the researchers. 

Researchers first taught the software to identify and fly towards a red chair. After the drone—a DJI quadcopter—proved this ability from 10 meters (about 33 feet) away, researchers incrementally increased the start distance. To their surprise, the drone slowly approached the target chair from distances as far as 45 meters (about 145 feet).

“I think that was the first time I thought, ‘this actually might be pretty powerful stuff’ because I’d never seen [the network piloting the drone] from this distance, and it did it consistently,” Makram Chahine, co-author and graduate researcher at MIT, says, “So that was pretty impressive to me.”

After the drone successfully flew toward objects at various distances, they tested its ability to identify the red chair from other chairs in an urban patio. Being able to correctly distinguish the chair from similar stimuli proved that the system could understand the actual task, rather than solely navigating towards an image of red pixels against a background.

For example, instead of a red chair, drones could be trained to identify whales against the image of an ocean, or humans left behind following a natural disaster. 

“Once we verified that the liquid networks were capable of at least replicating the task behavior, we then tried to look at their out-of-domain performance,” Patrick Kao, co-author and undergraduate researcher at MIT, says. They tested the drone’s ability to identify a red chair in both urban and wooded environments, in different seasons and lighting conditions. The network still proved successful, displaying versatile use in diverse surroundings.

[Related: Birders behold: Cornell’s Merlin app is now a one-stop shop for bird identification]

They tested two liquid neural networks against four non-liquid neural networks, and found that the liquid networks outperformed others in every area. It’s too early to declare exactly what allows liquid neural networks to be so successful. Researchers say one hypothesis might have something to do with the ability to understand causality, or cause-and-effect relationships, allowing the liquid network to focus on the target chair and navigate toward it regardless of the surrounding environment. 

The system is complex enough to complete tasks such as identifying an object and then moving itself towards it, but not too complex to prevent researchers from understanding its underlying processes. “We want to create something that is understandable, controllable, and [artificial general intelligence], that’s the future thing that we want to achieve,” Hasani says. “But right now we are far away from that.”

AI systems have been the subject of recent controversy, with concerns about safety and over-automation, but completely understanding the capabilities of their technology isn’t just a priority, it’s a purpose, researchers say.

“Everything that we do as a robotics and machine learning lab is [for] all-around safety and deployment of AI in a safe and ethical way in our society, and we really want to stick to this mission and vision that we have,” Hasani says.

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In the future, the US Air Force may employ drones that can accompany advanced fighter jets like the F-35, cruising along as fellow travelers. The vision for these drones is that they would be robotic wingmates, with perhaps two assigned to one F-35, a jet that’s operated by a single pilot. They would act as force multipliers for the aircraft that has a human in it, and would be able to execute tasks like dogfighting. The official term for these uncrewed machines is Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and the Air Force is thinking about acquiring them in bulk: It has said it would like to have 1,000 of them. 

To develop uncrewed aircraft like these, though, the military needs to be able to rely on autonomy software that can operate a combat drone just as effectively as a human would pilot a fighter jet, if not more so. A stepping stone to get there is an initiative called VENOM, and it will involve converting around a half dozen F-16s to be able to operate autonomously, albeit with a human in the cockpit as a supervisor. 

VENOM, of course, is an acronym. It stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model, with “Viper” being a common nickname for the F-16 Fighting Falcon, a highly maneuverable fighter jet.  

The VENOM program is about testing out autonomy on an F-16 that is “combat capable,” says Lt. Col. Robert Waller, the commander of the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

“We’re taking a combat F-16 and converting that into an autonomy flying testbed,” Waller adds. “We want to do what we call combat autonomy, and that is the air vehicle with associated weapons systems—radar, advanced electronic warfare capabilities, and the ability to integrate weapons—so you loop all of that together into one flying testbed.” 

The program builds on other efforts. A notable related initiative involved a special aircraft called VISTA, or the X-62A. Last year, AI algorithms from both DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory took the controls of that unique F-16D, which is a flying testbed with space for two aviators in it. 

[Related: Why DARPA put AI at the controls of a fighter jet]

The VENOM program will involve testing “additional capabilities that you cannot test on VISTA,” Waller says. “We now want to actually transition that [work from VISTA] to platforms with real combat capabilities, to see how those autonomy agents now operate with real systems instead of simulated systems.” 

At a recent panel discussion at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that touched on this topic, Air Force Maj. Gen. Evan Dertien said that VENOM is “the next evolution into scaling up what autonomy can do,” building on VISTA. Popular Science sibling website The War Zone reported on this topic last month. 

The project will see them using “about six” aircraft to test out the autonomy features, Waller tells PopSci, although the exact number hasn’t been determined, and neither has the exact model F-16 to get the autonomy features. “If we want the most cutting-edge radar or [electronic warfare] capabilities, then those will need to be integrated to an F-16C,” Waller says, referring to an F-16 model that seats just one person. 

The role of the human aviator in the cockpit of an F-16 that is testing out these autonomous capabilities is two-fold, Waller explains. The first is to be a “safety observer to ensure that the airplanes always return home, and that the autonomy agent doesn’t do anything unintended,” he notes. The second piece is to be “evaluating system performance.” In other words, to check out if the autonomy agent is doing a good job. 

Waller stresses that the human will have veto power over what the plane does. “These platforms, as flying testbeds, can and will let an autonomy agent fly the aircraft, and execute combat-related skills,” he says. “That pilot is in total control of the air vehicle, with the ability to turn off everything, to include the autonomy agent from flying anything, or executing anything.” 

Defense News notes that the Air Force is proposing almost $50 million for this project for the fiscal year 2024. 

“These airplanes will generally fly without combat loads—so no missiles, no bullets—[and] most, if not all of this, will be simulated capabilities, with a human that can turn off that capability at any time,” Waller says. 

Ultimately, the plan is not to develop F-16s that can fly themselves in combat without a human on board, but instead to keep developing the autonomy technology so it could someday operate a drone that can act like a fighter jet and accompany other aircraft piloted by people. 

Hear more about VENOM below, beginning around the 42 minute mark:

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Earlier this month, a new kind of electric boat was demonstrated in Colombia. The uncrewed COTEnergy Boat debuted at the Colombiamar 2023 business and industrial exhibition, held from March 8 to 10 in Cartagena. It is likely a useful tool for navies, and was on display as a potential product for other nations to adopt. 

While much of the attention in uncrewed sea vehicles has understandably focused on the ocean-ranging craft built for massive nations like the United States and China, the introduction of small drone ships for regional powers and routine patrol work shows just far this technology has come, and how widespread it is likely to be in the future.

“The Colombian Navy (ARC) intends to deploy the new electric unmanned surface vehicle (USV) CotEnergy Boat in April,” Janes reports, citing Admiral Francisco Cubides. 

The boat is made from aluminum and has a compact, light body. (See it on Instagram here.) Just 28.5 feet long and under 8 feet wide, the boat is powered by a 50 hp electric motor; its power is sustained in part by solar panels mounted on the top of the deck. Those solar panels can provide up to 1.1 kilowatts at peak power, which is enough to sustain its autonomous operation for just shy of an hour.

The vessel was made by Atomo Tech and Colombia’s state-owned naval enterprise company, COTECMAR. The company says the boat’s lightweight form allows it to take on different payloads, making it suitable for “intelligence and reconnaissance missions, port surveillance and control missions, support in communications link missions, among others.”

Putting sensors on small, autonomous and electric vessels is a recurring theme in navies that employ drone boats. Even a part of the ocean that seems small, like a harbor, represents a big job to watch. By putting sensors and communications links onto an uncrewed vessel, a navy can effectively extend the range of what can be seen by human operators. 

In January, the US Navy used Saildrones for this kind of work in the Persian Gulf. Equipped with cameras and processing power, the Saildrones identified and tracked ships in an exercise as they spotted them, making that information available to human operators on crewed vessels and ultimately useful to naval commanders. 

Another reason to turn to uncrewed vessels for this work is that they are easier to run on fully  electric power, as opposed to a diesel or gasoline. COTECMAR’s video description notes that the COTEEnergy Boat is being “incorporated into the offer of sustainable technological solutions that we are designing for the energy transition.” Making patrol craft solar powered and electric starts the vessels sustainable.

While developed as a military tool, the COTENERGY boat can also have a role in scientific and research expeditions. It could serve as a communications link between other ships, or between ships and other uncrewed vessels, ensuring reliable operation and data collection. Putting in sensors designed to look under the water’s surface could aid with oceanic mapping and observation. As a platform for sensors, the COTEnergy Boat is limited by what its adaptable frame can carry and power, although its load capacity is 880 pounds.

Not much more is known about the COTEnergy Boat at this point. But what is compelling about the vessel is how it fits into similar plans of other navies. Fielding small useful autonomous scouts or patrol craft, if successful, could become a routine part of naval and coastal operations.

With these new kinds of boat come new challenges. Because uncrewed ships lack humans, it can make them easier targets for other navies or possibly maritime criminal groups, like pirates. The same kind of Saildrones used by the US Navy to scout the Persian Gulf have also been detained, if briefly, by the Iranian Navy. With such detentions comes the risk that data on the ship is compromised, and data collection tools figured out, making it easier for hostile forces to fool or evade the sensors in the future.

Still, the benefits of having a flexible, solar-powered robot ship outweigh such risks. Inspection of ports is routine until it isn’t, and with a robotic vessel there to scout first, humans can wait to act until they are needed, safely removed from their remote robotic companions.

Watch a little video of the COTEnergy Boat below:

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Earlier this month, Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries showed off a new tool for fighting against drones. With an enclosed cabin on top of a four-wheel ATV frame, the system mounts a high-energy laser in the back, alongside the power needed to make it work. It is part of the growing arsenal of counter-drone weapons, and one that fits into the expanded role and arsenal of Japan’s modern military.

The laser and ATV combination was on display at the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) Japan conference, which ran from March 15 through 17 outside Tokyo. The exhibition is a place for various arms makers from around the world to gather and showcase their wares to interested collaborators or governments. This year’s conference, the second Japan-hosted iteration, had 66 countries and 178 companies represented.

The system, while funded by Kawasaki, was made at the request of Japan’s Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency (ATLA), a rough analog of DARPA that looks to integrate new tech into Japan’s self-defense forces. On display, the laser system included a tracker, a high-energy laser, a gimbal to balance and hold the laser’s focus, and a 2 kilowatt power source. It has a range of just 100 meters or 328 feet for destroying drones, though it can track targets at up to 300 meters, or 984 feet. It was mounted on a Mule Pro-FX, a three-seat all terrain vehicle that retails for $15,000.

“The system tracks targets with an infrared camera, and laser beams cause instantaneous damage to UAVs and mortar shells. ATLA and Kawasaki have been testing it for this purpose, plus they are researching whether it can also intercept missiles,” reports Shephard Media.

A 2019 document from the Ministry of Defense outlined Japan’s vision for how to use new technology to improve its defense forces. Lasers, or directed energy weapons, are mentioned as a tool to intercept incoming missiles through precise targeting. These weapons are seen as part of a comprehensive suite of tools that utilize the electro-magnetic spectrum, a category that includes sensors for watching enemy signals, as well as jammers and high-powered microwaves that can interfere with or harm enemy electronics.

“High-power directed energy weapons must be realized from the standpoint of low reaction time countermeasures for accelerated aircraft and missiles as well as low cost countermeasures for miniature unmanned aircraft, mortar shells, and other large-scale, low cost threats,” reads a 2020 strategy document from ATLA. This document explicitly argues for the damage and destruction by high-powered lasers as their most salient points. Against missiles, uncrewed ships, and drones, especially smaller cheaper drones, lasers can be an invaluable asset.

What sets Kawasaki’s displayed laser vehicle apart from others is the power level. At just 2 kilowatts, the vehicle is attempting to fry drones with an amount of power roughly comparable to what it takes to run a dishwasher. Raytheon’s counter-drone laser, which Popular Science got to fire first-hand in October 2022, fires a 10 kilowatt beam. Other laser weapons, designed to quickly burn through incoming artillery rounds or missiles, can use power in the tens or even low hundreds of kilowatts.

Drones, especially the commercial kind that have become an essential part of how armies in Ukraine fight, are small, weak targets. A laser does not necessarily need a ton of power if it is going to burn through the more vulnerable parts of a quadcopter. Tracking tools, which let lasers stay focused on a target, can let a lower-powered laser burn through plastic and metal in the same time as a more powerful but less locked-on laser might.

While the laser at DSEI was displayed on the back of an ATV, it could be mounted on other vehicles, a situation where its power requirements could be an added bonus. As a tool for hunting down drones, limited range and power hinder function, but as a defensive system mounted on vehicles that might come under attack by drone, a smaller laser that sips power could be enough to disable a drone. Drones can be deadly threats on their own by dropping bombs, but they are also used as spotters for other weapons, like artillery. If the spotter is incapacitated and the convoy moves on, artillery are left to fire at where they think the vehicles are, rather than where they know their targets to be. 

“Japan will also reinforce the capability to respond to small UAVs with weapons including directed-energy weapons,” reads a defense strategy published December 2022. “By approximately ten years from now, Japan will reinforce its integrated air and missile defense capabilities by further introducing research on capability to respond to hypersonic weapons in the gliding phase and interception by non-kinetic means to deal with assets such as small UAVs.”

Lasers like this are the start of an effective counter-drone strategy, one explicitly framed as a beginning approach while developing more and different powerful systems. These could include high-powered lasers and high-powered microwaves. As the threat from small drones has expanded, so too are the tools explored by countries to stop all manner of aerial threat, including small drones.

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On March 8, in the ocean between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, the US Navy tested out a new drone. Called the Aerovel Flexrotor, it rests on a splayed tail, and boasts a powerful rotor just below the neck of its bulbous front-facing camera pod. The tail-sitting drone needs very little deck space for takeoff or landing, and once in the sky, it pivots and flies like a typical fixed-wing plane. It joins a growing arsenal of tools that are especially useful in the confined launch zones of smaller ship decks or unimproved runways.

The March flights took place as part of the International Maritime Exercise 2023, billed as a multinational undertaking involving 7,000 people from across 50 nations. Activities in the exercise include working on following orders together, maritime patrol, countering naval mines, testing the integration of drones and artificial intelligence, and work related to global health. It is a hodgepodge of missions, capturing the multitude of tasks that navies can be called upon to perform.

This deployment is at least the second time the Flexrotor has been brought to the Persian Gulf by the US Navy. In December 2022, a Coast Guard ship operating as part of a Naval task force in the region launched a Flexrotor. This flight was part of an event called Digital Horizon, aimed at integrating drones and AI into Navy operations, and it included 10 systems not yet used in the region.

“The Flexrotor can support intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions day and night using a daylight or infrared camera to provide a real-time video feed,” read a 2022 release from US Central Command. The release continued: “In addition to providing ISR capability, UAVs like the Flexrotor enable Task Force 59 to enhance a resilient communications network used by unmanned systems to relay video footage, pictures and other data to command centers ashore and at sea.”

Putting drones on ships is hardly new. ScanEagles, a scout-drone used by the US Navy since 2005, can be launched from a rail and landed by net or skyhook. What sets the Flexrotor apart is not that it is a drone on a ship, but the fact that it requires a minimum of infrastructure to make it usable. This is because the drone is a tail-sitter.

What is a tail-sitter?

There are two basic ways to move a heavier-than-air vehicle from the ground to the sky: generate lift from spinning rotors, or generate lift from forward thrust and fixed wings. Helicopters have many advantages, needing only landing pads instead of runways, and they can easily hover in flight. But helicopters’ aerodynamics limit cruising and maximum speeds, even as advances continue to be made. 

Fixed wings, in turn, need to build speed and lift off on runways, or find another way to get into the sky. For rail-launched drones like the ScanEagle, this is done with a rail, though other methods have been explored.

Between helicopters and fixed-wing craft sit tiltrotors and jump-jets, where the the thrust (from either rotors/propellers or ducted jets) changes as the plane stays level in flight, allowing vertical landings and short takeoffs. This is part of what DARPA is exploring through the SPRINT program.

Tail-sitters, instead, involve the entire plane pivoting in flight. In effect, they look almost like a rocket upon launch, narrow bodies pointed to pierce the sky, before leveling out in flight and letting the efficiency of lift from fixed wings extend flight time and range. (Remember the space shuttle? It was positioned like a tail-sitter when it blasted off, but landed like an airplane, albeit without engines.) Early tail-sitters suffered because they had to accommodate a human pilot through all those transitions. Modern tail-sitter drones, like the Flexrotor or Australia’s STRIX, instead have human operators guiding the craft remotely from a control station. Another example is Bell’s APT 70.

The advantage to a tail-sitting drone is that it only needs a clearing or open deck space as large as its widest dimension. In the case of the Flexrotor, that means a rotor diameter of 7.2 feet, with at least one part of the launching surface wide enough for the drone’s nearly 10-foot wingspan. By contrast, the Seahawk helicopters used by the US Navy have a rotor diameter of over 53 feet. Ships that can already accommodate helicopters can likely easily add tail-sitter drones, and ships that couldn’t possibly fit a full-sized crewed helicopter might be able to take on and operate a drone scout.

In use, the Flexrotor boasts a cruising speed of 53 mph, a top speed of 87 mph, and potentially more than 30 hours of continuous operation. After takeoff, the Flexrotor pivots to fixed-wing flight, and the splayed tail retracts into a normal tail shape, allowing the craft to operate like a regular fixed-wing plane in the sky. Long endurance drones like these allow crews to pilot them in shifts, reducing pilot fatigue without having to land the drone to switch operators. Aerovel claims that Flexrotors have a range of over 1,265 miles at cruising speeds. In the air, the drone can serve as a scout with daylight and infrared cameras, and it can also work as a communications relay node, especially valuable if fleets are dispersed and other communications are limited.

As the Navy looks to expand what it can see and respond to, adding scouts that can be stowed away and then launched from cleared deck space expands the perception of ships. By improving scouting on the ocean, the drones make the vastness of the sea a little more knowable.

Watch a video below:

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Ikea announced a new company milestone last week—100 drones tasked with stock inventory responsibilities are now buzzing around its European warehouses during store off-hours. The iconic home furnishing giant first revealed its partnership with the indoor drone fleet developer Verity in 2020.  The duo initially deployed aerial workers in a handful of Switzerland locales, to self-described “great” results. Now, however, the drones can also be found in 16 locations across the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Slovenia, Croatia, and Belgium.

[Related: New robot moves Amazon towards increased warehouse automation.]

According to Ingka, the legal entity overseeing most Ikea locations, the drones help improve stock accuracy and maintain up-to-date item availability for both physical and online retail. At night and while locations are closed, the Verity drones take off from their charging stations to sweep warehouse pallets, capturing video, images, and even 3D depth scans of items at near-perfect accuracy. They then return to charging stations, and download the data for managers to review. In theory, their existence in the workplace provides a more ergonomic environment for the drones’ human co-workers, since it decreases the need for them to manually confirm each pallet of products. Watch a video of the branded blue-and-yellow drones in action below:

Verity was founded in 2014 by Raffaello D’Andrea around two years after Amazon acquired his previous tech company, Kiva Systems, for $775 million. Kiva was promptly renamed to Amazon Robotics, and provided the foundation for the retail empire’s ongoing automation efforts across its massive warehouse landscape—efforts which critics argue have eradicated human job opportunities. Verity has also provided drone fleets to companies like Samsung, DSV Transport, and Maersk.

As The Verge also noted on Monday, Ikea hasn’t limited their high-tech approaches to just drones. Previously, the company began experimenting with an automated racking system to eliminate the “majority” of a California location’s forklifts. Elsewhere, everyone from massive companies like Google, to smaller startups are attempting to bring commercial drones into their everyday ecosystems.

[Related: Drones and droids could make deliveries from the sky.]

“Introducing drones and other advanced tools – such as, for example, robots for picking up goods – is a genuine win-win for everybody. It improves our co-workers’ wellbeing, lowers operational costs, and allows us to become more affordable and convenient for our customers,” Tolga Öncu, Head of Retail at Ingka, said in their announcement last week.

In a statement provided to PopSci via email, an Ikea spokesperson explained the drones allow human workers “to have more time to meet our customers on the shopfloor instead of tracking inventory manually.” When asked if these drones could eventually replace human labor, they explained that employees are still needed to review the fleets’ collected data. “As we embrace automation in many areas of our business, we are committed to do it responsibly and always take care of our co-workers,” they wrote.

If nothing else, their drones provide more concrete advancements than, say, locking oneself away in a Martian landscape simulator to help spur new furniture designs.

Updated with a statement from Ikea.

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The Air Force is asking Congress for 1,000 new combat drones to accompany planes into battle. The announcement, from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, came March 7, as part of a broader push for Air Force modernization. It fits into a broader plan to combine crewed fighters, like F-35s and new designs, with drone escorts, thus expanding the scope of what the Air Force can do without similarly increasing the demand for new pilots.

Kendall spoke at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. The speech focused on what the Air Force can and must do to remain competitive with China, which Kendall referred to as “our packing challenge.” While the Air Force can outline its expectations and desires in a budget, it is ultimately up to Congress to set the funding sought by the military. That means Kendall’s call for 1,000 drones isn’t just an ask, it has to be a sales pitch.

“The [Department of the Air Force] is moving forward with a family of systems for the next generation of air dominance, that will include both the NGAD platform and the introduction of uncrewed collaborative aircraft to provide affordable mass and dramatically increased cost-effectiveness,” said Kendall. By NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance), Kendall was referring to a concept for future fighter planning, where a new crewed fighter plane heads a family of systems that includes escort drones. One of these potential drone escorts is called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA.

This Collaborative Combat Aircraft fits with the broader plans of the Air Force to augment and expand the number of aircraft it has by having drones fly as escorts and accessories to crewed and piloted fighters. These fighters include the existing and expanding inventory of F-35A stealth jets, as well as the next generation of planes planned for the future.

Kendall broke down the math like this: “[General Charles Q. Brown] and I have recently given our planners a nominal quantity of collaborative combat aircraft to assume for planning purposes. That planning assumption is 1,000 CCAs,” said Kendall. “This figure was derived from an assumed two CCAs per 200 NGAD platforms [equalling 400 drones], an additional two for each of 300 F-35s, for a total of a thousand.” 

One reason for the Air Force to pursue drone escorts is because they can expand what the planes can do, without requiring another expensive craft of a vulnerable pilot. Stealth on an F-35A jet fighter protects the pilot and the $78 million plane. If a drone can fly alongside a plane, help it on missions, and costs a fraction of the crewed fighter, then it may make more sense for the drones to be, if not disposable, somewhat more expendable.

Previously, the Air Force referred to this as “attritable,” a term coined to suggest the drones could be lost to combat (attrition), without emphasizing that the drones were built specifically to be lost. In Kendall’s remarks on March 7, he instead used the term “affordable mass,” which emphasizes the way these drones will increase the numbers of aircraft an enemy has to defeat in order to stop an aerial attack.

“One way to think of CCAs is as remotely controlled versions of the charting pods, electronic warfare pods, or weapons now carried under the wings of our crude aircraft. CCAs will dramatically improve the performance of our crude aircraft and significantly reduce the risk to our pilots,” said Kendall.

In this way, a drone escort flying alongside a fighter is just an extra set of bombs, cameras, missiles, or jammers, all in a detached body flying as an escort to the fighter. In 2017, the Air Force announced an attritable drone escort, using the Valkyrie built for the task by target drone maker Kratos. 

The first Valkyrie is already a museum piece, but it represents a rough overview of the kind of cost and functions the Air Force may want in a Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Priced at around $2 million, a Valkyrie is not cheap, but it is much cheaper than the fighters it would fly alongside. As designed, it can fly for up to 3,400 miles, with a top speed of 650 mph. That would make it capable of operating in theater with a fighter, with escorts likely delivered to bases by ground transport and then synched up with the fighters before missions.

Getting drones to fly alongside crewed planes has been part of the Air Force’s Loyal Wingman program, which shifts the burden of flying onto onboard systems in the drone. Presently, drones used by the US, like the MQ-9 Reaper that crashed into the Black Sea, are labor-intensive, crewed by multiple shifts of remote pilots. To make drones labor-saving, they will need to work similar to a human compassion, receiving commands from a squad leader but independent enough to execute those commands without human hands on the controls. The Air Force is experimenting with AI piloting of jets, including having artificial intelligence fly a crewed F-16 in December.

Whatever shape these loyal wingmates end up taking, by asking for them in bulk, Kendall is making a clear bid. The age of fighter pilots in the Air Force may not be over, but for the wars of the future, they will be joined by robots as allies.

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For years, a drone company called Zipline has made deliveries using a fairly traditional approach: An uncrewed aircraft with an 11-foot wingspan drops off a package with a parachute, and it descends to the ground thanks to the predictable presence of gravity. Today, the company announced that they’re working on a new system for drone delivery that’s a bit more tech-forward: They plan to use what they refer to as a “droid” to place a package directly on a target, like a table in a customer’s backyard. 

The goal of using this so-called droid—more on how it all works in a moment—is to be able deposit the delivery in a precise way, even if there’s wind. The company refers to this new approach as platform two. (Platform one refers to the parachute approach, which uses a plane that can fly forward but cannot hover in place.) Perhaps, speculates the company’s head of engineering, Jo Mardall, the arrival of a package with this new system will even be a surprise to a customer. 

“The core of platform two is really to enable ultra-precise, silent delivery to homes,” Mardall, a former Tesla engineering director, tells PopSci. “I like to think, for platform two, that I might be standing at my back door, turn around to chat to my kids for a second in the kitchen, and I turn back around and there’s a package that’s been delivered to my deck behind me, and I don’t know how it got there.”

During an event today, the company’s CEO, Keller Cliffton, said that the objective for this new home delivery system is for the item to arrive in a way that feels “like teleportation.” 

The way the new airborne system works is a bit like a flying mechanical turducken—that infamous culinary creation that involves a chicken within a duck within a turkey. In this case, the package being delivered (the metaphorical chicken) is within the droid unit (the duck), which is nestled into the aircraft itself (the turkey). 

The new aircraft has four small rotors and a propeller in the back that can tilt to help it hover. The aircraft makes the delivery from some 300 feet, hovering above the target area. Then, the droid lowers on a tether towards, say, a picnic table. “It lands very briefly—for a second or two,” Mardall says. During that brief landing, doors on the belly of the droid open to deposit the package. 

After the delivery, the droid winches back up to the main drone, which is waiting above, and then the aircraft continues on its journey. The aspect of this new approach that is designed to allow for better precision, even during windy days, are thrusters on the droid itself. These thrusters—one electric fan in the rear, and two additional ones in other locations—can blow air to help the mini-drone, which Mardall says is about the size of a gym bag, maneuver. 

[Related: Getting rescued by helicopter has risks. This gadget could make it safer.]

“When [it’s] coming down on the winch, if it’s a windy day, we need to have a system to control the location of that droid,” he says. That’s where the three thrusters come into play. “Those thrusters mean that the Zip [the drone mothership above] is just carrying the weight, it’s not having to set the position.”

He adds that because the main drone remains at 300 feet above the target, the whole system is quiet. “This thing is barely audible—just sounds like the rustling of leaves in the trees,” he says. 

Aviation engineering typically involves tradeoffs, and this new system is no exception. Their gen-one drones, which resemble small airplanes with a wing, a v-shaped tail, and propellers in the back, have a range of about 50 miles. The new aircraft have the ability to hover and lower a droid, but unlike their predecessors, they have a range of just about 10 miles out and 10 miles back for dropping off an item and then returning from the same place it launched. Or, if the new drone is going on a one-way trip, traveling to a location where it can land and then charge, the range is 24 miles. “You don’t get to cheat the physics here—when you have to hover, hovering is more expensive from an energy point of view,” he says. 

The packages this new system can carry can weigh anywhere between 6 and 8 pounds. Mardall says that this year they will be testing the new system in California, and 2024 will see “a pilot delivering to real customers.” They’re aiming for it to be able to deliver items like meals-to-order, meaning that a Sweetgreen salad could theoretically arrive by droid onto a picnic table in someone’s backyard at some point in the future. The company also unveiled a logistics system that can be incorporated into the side of a building, allowing the drones to dock on the outside, and the droid to enter and exit through a small door for loading. 

Zipline isn’t alone in the market of delivering items from the sky. One competitor, Wing—from Google’s parent company, Alphabet—just announced a new AutoLoader system and what they’re calling the Wing Delivery Network. Wing’s drones also employ a tether to load and deliver the package, but they do not have a droid. 

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This post has been updated on March 16 to include video of the incident released by the US Department of Defense. The story was originally published on March 14, 2022.

At 7:03 am Central European Time on March 14, one of a pair of Russian Su-27 fighter jets flying over the Black Sea struck the propeller of an MQ-9 reaper drone piloted by the United States. According to US European Command, the strike against the propeller required the drone’s remote pilots to bring it down into international water. It is hardly the first takedown of a Reaper drone, nor is it even the first time Russian forces have caused the destruction of such a plane, but any confrontation between military aircraft of the world’s two foremost nuclear-armed states can understandably feel tense.

Since 2021, the United States has based MQ-9 Reaper drones in Romania, a NATO ally that borders both Ukraine and the Black Sea. These Reapers, as well as Reapers flown from elsewhere, were part of the overall aerial surveillance mission undertaken by the United States and NATO on the eve of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

What happened over the Black Sea?

The basics of the incident are as follows: “Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9,” said US Air Force general James B. Hecker, commander of US Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, in a statement about the incident published by US European Command. “In fact, this unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash. US and Allied aircraft will continue to operate in international airspace and we call on the Russians to conduct themselves professionally and safely.” (Watch video of the incident here.)

This is language that emphasizes the incident as a mistake or malfeasance by the two Russian Su-27 pilots. It is not, notably, a demand that the loss of a Reaper be met with more direct confrontation between the United States and Russia, even as the US backs Ukraine with supplies and, often, intelligence as it fights against the continued Russia invasion. In the years prior to Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine, Russian jets have harassed US aircraft over the Black Sea. It is a common enough occurrence that the think tank RAND has even published a study on what kind of signals Russia intends to send when it intercepts aircraft near but not in Russian airspace.

“Several times before the collision,” according to European Command, “the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defence also released a statement on the incident, claiming that the Reaper was flying without a transponder turned on, that the Reaper was headed for Russian borders, and that the plane crashed of its own accord, without any contact with Russian jets.

In a press briefing the afternoon of March 14, Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder noted that the Russian pilots were flying near the drone for 30 to 40 minutes before the collision that damaged the Reaper. Asked if the drone was near Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea that was part of Ukraine until Russia occupied it in 2014, Ryder said only that the flight was in international waters and well clear of any territory of Ukraine. Ryder also did not clarify when asked about whether or not the Reaper was armed, saying instead that it was conducting an ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) mission.

The New York Times reported that the drone was not armed, citing a military official.

What is an MQ-9 Reaper?

The Reaper is an uncrewed aerial vehicle, propelled by a pusher prop. It is made by General Atomics, and is an evolution of the Predator drone, which started as an unarmed scout before being adapted into a lightly armed bomber. The Reaper entered operational service in October 2007, and it was designed from the start to carry weapons. It can wield nearly 4,000 pounds of explosives, like laser guided bombs, or up to eight Hellfire missiles.

They measure 36 feet from tip to tail and have a wingspan of 66 feet, and in 2020 cost about $18 million apiece. 

To guide remote pilots for takeoff and landing, Reapers have a forward-facing camera, mounted at the front of their match-shaped airframes. To perceive the world below, and offer useful real-time video and imaging, a sensor pod complete with laser target designator, infrared camera, and electro-optical cameras pivots underneath the front of the drone, operated by a second crew member on the ground: the sensor operator. 

Reapers can stay airborne at altitudes of up to 50,000 feet for up to 24 hours, with remote crews guiding the plane in shifts and trading off mid-flight. The Reaper’s long endurance, not just hours in the sky but its ability to operate up to 1,150 miles away from where it took off, lets it watch vast areas, looking for relevant movement below. This was a crucial part of how the US fought the counter insurgency in Iraq and especially Afghanistan, where armed Reapers watched for suspected enemies proved an enduring feature of the war, to mixed results.

While Reapers have been used for well over a decade, they have mostly seen action in skies relatively clear of hostile threats. A Reaper’s top speed is just 276 mph, and while its radar can see other aircraft, the Su-27 air superiority fighter can run laps around it at Mach 2.35. In seeking a future replacement for Reapers, the US Air Force has stated an intention that these planes be able to defend themselves against other aircraft.

Have drones like the Reaper been shot down before?

The most famous incident of a US drone shoot-down is the destruction of an RQ-4 Global Hawk by Iran in June 2019. This unarmed surveillance drone was operating in the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz, a highly trafficked waterway that borders Iran on one side and the Arabian Peninsula on the other. Iran claimed the Global Hawk was shot down within Iran’s territorial waters; the United States argued instead that the drone was operating in international waters. While the crisis did not escalate beyond the destruction of the drone, it was unclear at the time that this incident would end calmly.

Reapers have been shot down by militaries including the US Air Force. In 2009, US pilots lost control of an MQ-9 Reaper over Afghanistan, so a crewed fighter shot it down proactively before it crashed into another country.

In 2017 and again in 2019, Houthi insurgent forces in Yemen shot down US Reapers flying over the country. Reapers have also been lost to jamming, when the signals between operators and drone were obstructed or cut, as plausibly happened to a Reaper operated by the Italian military over Libya in 2019.

Ultimately, the March 14 takedown of the Reaper by Russian fighters appears to be part of the larger new normal of drones as a part of regular military patrols. Like with the US destruction of a surveillance balloon in the Atlantic, the most interesting lesson is less what happened between aircraft in the sky, and more what is discovered by whoever gets to the wrecked aircraft in the water first.

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Wing, the drone-delivery subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has just revealed a new device called the AutoLoader that brings the company a step closer to its vision of wide-spread, affordable, drone-powered, last-mile delivery. The AutoLoader will allow delivery drones to collect packages from an automated curb-side device that can be situated in an unused parking spot. The device, which enables a drone to collect a package without landing or much human intervention, will mean that drones no longer have to return to a central hub after each trip as part of the company’s new Wing Delivery Network.

Over the past few years, Wing has proved to be one of Alphabet’s most interesting moonshots. It now operates commercial drone delivery services in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas, as well as in Finland and Australia, where customers can order small products, groceries, and take-away food from local shops using an app. According to Wing, it has “moved as many as one thousand packages per day in a delivery region of more than 100,000 people.”

While an impressive feat, Wing is limited by how it currently operates. When a customer orders something, a package is prepared by staff and loaded onto a drone waiting outside on a charging pad. It then flies to the customer at speeds of up to 65 mph, giving it a six-mile range and maximum of six-minute delivery time, before dropping off its package using a tether and returning to its base. It works as a proof of concept, but as a system, it doesn’t offer a lot of opportunity for growth or scale. 

Wing’s AutoLoader and Wing Delivery Network aim to solve these problems. The AutoLoader is designed to work with a store’s existing curb-side pickup workflow, and means that packages don’t have to come from a single drone-supported location. Instead, staff at the store will be able to load a package into the AutoLoader where one of Wing’s aircraft can collect it using its tether and drop it to a customer. Then, as long as it has enough battery life, the drone can collect another package from a different store, and so on and so on, until it needs to return to base to land and recharge. In a video introducing the setup, Wing CEO Adam Woodworth likened it to ride-sharing apps like Uber. In other words, instead of a hub-and-spoke model, this approach aims to link multiple stops together.

[Related: Check out Wing’s new delivery drone prototypes]

The AutoLoader and Wing Delivery Network are both part of Wing’s aim to have a delivery system capable of delivering millions of packages to millions of customers by mid-2024—and at a lower cost per delivery than ground transport, like cars, bikes, and scooters, can do for the fast delivery of small packages.

“The discussion in this industry has often been about building a great drone delivery service, but it hasn’t really been about building a delivery service,” Woodworth explains by Zoom. To him, “the drone part is the least important part.” 

If Wing is to succeed, it needs to go beyond the novelty of flying packages around and become a meaningful delivery business. On the same call, Jonathan Bass, head of Wing’s marketing and communications, says, “It’s not replacing ground delivery, but we strongly believe that, as part of a multimodal delivery environment, [Wing] can play a significant role in the fast delivery of small packages.”

And according to Woodworth, things are looking good. “We are now at the place where the technology is largely ready. [Wing’s] demonstrations in the different markets have shown that these are viable options and that people want to actually use the service, and the regulatory environments are at a place where that sort of scale and that sort of growth is feasible,” he says. “This is the time to go and push it over the finish line.”

The AutoLoader will likely roll out in Australia first, according to Woodworth, where Wing has its most mature commercial market. If it works there, Wing plans to scale and replicate it around the world. If it can do that, it might get its millions of packages to millions of customers.

Watch a short video about the new approach, below.

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In December, a special fighter jet made multiple flights out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. The orange, white, and blue aircraft, which is based on an F-16, seats two people. A fighter jet taking to the skies with a human or two on board is not remarkable, but what is indeed remarkable about those December flights is that for periods of time, artificial intelligence flew the jet. 

As the exploits of generative AI like ChatGPT grip the public consciousness, artificial intelligence has also quietly slipped into the military cockpit—at least in these December tests.  

The excursions were part of a DARPA program called ACE, which stands for Air Combat Evolution. The AI algorithms came from different sources, including a company called Shield AI as well as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Broadly speaking, the tests represent the Pentagon exploring just how effective AI can be at carrying out tasks in planes typically done by people, such as dogfighting. 

“In total, ACE algorithms were flown on several flights with each sortie lasting approximately an hour and a half,” Lt. Col. Ryan Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE, notes to PopSci via email. “In addition to each performer team controlling the aircraft during dogfighting scenarios, portions of each sortie were dedicated to system checkout.”

The flights didn’t come out of nowhere. In August of 2020, DARPA put artificial intelligence algorithms through their paces in an event called the AlphaDogfight Trials. That competition didn’t involve any actual aircraft flying through the skies, but it did conclude with an AI agent defeating a human flying a digital F-16. The late 2022 flights show that software agents that can make decisions and dogfight have been given a chance to actually fly a real fighter jet. “This is the first time that AI has controlled a fighter jet performing within visual range (WVR) maneuvering,” Hefron notes.

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

So how did it go? “We didn’t run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live,” Hefron said in a DARPA press release. 

Andrew Metrick, a fellow in the defense program at the Center for New American Security, says that he is “often quite skeptical of the applications of AI in the military domain,” with that skepticism focused on just how much practical use these systems will have. But in this case—an artificial intelligence algorithm in the cockpit—he says he’s more of a believer. “This is one of those areas where I think there’s actually a lot of promise for AI systems,” he says. 

The December flights represent “a pretty big step,” he adds. “Getting these things integrated into a piece of flying hardware is non-trivial. It’s one thing to do it in a synthetic environment—it’s another thing to do it on real hardware.” 

Not all of the flights were part of the DARPA program. All told, the Department of Defense says that a dozen sorties took place, with some of them run by DARPA and others run by a program out of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The DOD notes that the DARPA tests were focused more on close aerial combat, while the other tests from AFRL involved situations in which the AI was competing against “a simulated adversary” in a “beyond-vision-range” scenario. In other words, the two programs were exploring how the AI did in different types of aerial contests or situations. 

Breaking Defense reported earlier this year that the flights kicked off December 9. The jet flown by the AI is based on an F-16D, and is called VISTA; it has space for two people. “The front seat pilot conducted the test points,” Hefron explains via email, “while the backseater acted as a safety pilot who maintained broader situational awareness to ensure the safety of the aircraft and crew.”

One of the algorithms that flew the jet came from a company called Shield AI. In the AlphaDogfight trials of 2020, the leading AI agent was made by Heron Systems, which Shield AI acquired in 2021. Shield’s CEO, Ryan Tseng, is bullish on the promise of AI to outshine humans in the cockpit. “I do not believe that there’s an air combat mission where AI pilots should not be decisively better than their human counterparts, for much of the mission profile,” he says. That said, he notes that “I believe the best teams will be a combination of AI and people.” 

One such future for teaming between a person and AI could involve AI-powered fighter-jet-like drones such as the Ghost Bat working with a crewed aircraft like an F-35, for example. 

It’s still early days for the technology. Metrick, of the Center for New American Security, wonders how the AI agent would be able to handle a situation in which the jet does not respond as expected, like if the aircraft stalls or experiences some other type of glitch. “Can the AI recover from that?” he wonders. A human may be able to handle “an edge case” like that more easily than software.

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Why spend all that time building and fine tuning robots that mimic birds when you can just…stuff robots in dead birds’ bodies? It’s hardly that simple, but  a recent project courtesy of Mostafa Hassanalian and their fellow New Mexico Tech colleagues put the peculiar idea to the test.

The team, who presented their work in late January at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ SciTech Forum, designed new systems reliant on taxidermy bird parts and artificial wing setups to mirror their (formerly living) avian inspirations. As New Scientist also highlighted on Tuesday, Hassanalian’s group technically built two dead bird bots—one fusing artificial body parts with an actual pheasant’s head and feathers, as well as a mechanical body combined with real pigeon wings.

[Related: Watch this bird-like robot make a graceful landing on its perch.]

The techno-taxidermy models, perhaps unsurprisingly, lag considerably behind their living counterparts’ maneuverability, speed, and grace. Currently, however, the feathery drones can glide, hover in place, and soar higher on hot thermal currents—just don’t expect them to do anything elegantly just yet, judging from video supplied to PopSci by Hassanalian.

The uncanniness of robot birds flying arount may not be much of an issue for the new designs’ potential usages, anyway. The research team’s paper notes that future models could hypothetically be used as “spy drones for military use,” although Hassanalian makes it clear in an email that this is far from its foremost goal of “developing a nature-friendly drone concept for wildlife monitoring.” Traditional drones are often disruptive to ecosystems due to issues such as sound and unfamiliarity, so developing quieter, natural-looking alternatives could help wildlife monitoring and research.

[Related: Reverse-engineered hummingbird wings could inspire new drone designs.]

Hassanalian also notes there are potential biological discoveries to be found in mimicking bird movement. For example, figuring out  how actual birds conserve energy while flying in V-formations or the role that feather colors and patterns may affect heat absorption and airflow.

Of course, any plans will require a bit more delving into the ethics and research guidelines for using deceased birds in future tinkerings. And before you ask—don’t worry. Hassanalian’s team worked with a nearby taxidermy artist to source the drones’ natural components. No real birds were physically harmed in the making of the drones. But it remains to be seen if any living animals will suffer psychologically from potentially seeing their cyborg cousins snapping spy photos of them one day.

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One of the most striking aspects of the military’s much-analyzed UAP footage is some of the objects’ apparent ability to travel between air and water in the blink of an eye. Something capable of such a feat may certainly appear like some seriously extraterrestrial technology to the untrained eye, but a research team at the Chinese University of Hong Kong recently showed that, at least on a small scale, it’s not impossible to do.

As highlighted by New Scientist and soon-to-be detailed at the upcoming IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Ben Chen and their team’s small “Mirs-X” quadcopter prototype can hover about six minutes in the air, or dive as deep as three meters for a whopping 40 minutes. To accomplish the dual biome maneuvering, researchers equipped each of the drone’s four motors with a dual-speed gearbox. The motors and propellers are situated on rotating mounts capable of tilting and changing direction independent of one another, thus allowing for underwater propulsion.

[Related: Bat-like echolocation could help these robots find lost people.]

Precise propeller speed is also a vital factor for Mirs-X’s success. Given air is far less dense than water, the drone’s propellers must be able to spin incredibly fast to generate enough lift to rise and hover. Those same mechanisms can then slow down immensely once underwater to offer the appropriate thrust.

Although the Mirs-X prototype is pretty small—measuring just under 15 inches across and weighing barely 3.5 pounds—Chen’s team hopes to scale up the drone as large as 6 feet across in future experiments. They also hope to include additional abilities like grasping and carrying objects recovered underwater, although cautioned to New Scientist that further waterproofing could hamper its effectiveness.

If the hurdles could be cleared, however, such a drone could one day prove immensely useful for situations such as search and rescue operations requiring both aerial and submerged reconnaissance, or for inspecting engineering and industrial areas… perhaps a team-up with that new echolocation bot could prove interesting.

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On January 12, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. The term “UAP,” which is largely synonymous with the original usage of Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, is designed to be a broad category for reporting observed but unexplained sights in the sky, a kind of “see something, say something” for pilots. 

The report, mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022, includes the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was originally created within the Department of Defense in 2020 as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. “All domains” means the phenomena need not be flying in the sky, but could also occur at sea, in space, or on land. 

This is the second report on UAPs since the creation of the task force, following a preliminary report released in 2021. In the preliminary report from two years ago, the task force identified 144 sightings over the previous 17 years. In the new report, there are a total of 510 sightings, including those 144 already documented, 247 new ones made since the first report, and 119 reports of events prior to 2021 but that were not included in the initial assessment, for a total of 366 newly identified reports.

[Related: UFO research is stigmatized. NASA wants to change that.]

The majority of new reports come from US Navy and US Air Force “aviators and operators,” who saw the phenomena during regular operations, and then reported those sightings to the newly created appropriate channels, like the AARO. 

The official takeaway? “AARO’s initial analysis and characterization of the 366 newly-identified reports, informed by a multi-agency process, judged more than half as exhibiting unremarkable characteristics,” the document notes. Of those unremarkable reports: 26 were drones or drone-like, 163 were balloons or balloon-like, and six were clutter spotted in the sky.

That leaves 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed” remaining from the batch of newly identified reports, a group that is perhaps thought of more as unresolved than unexplainable. Of those, some “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” though anyone looking for that analysis in the report will be sorely disappointed.

Tracking, cataloging, and identifying unexplained—or at least not immediately explainable—phenomena is tricky work. It has created persistent problems for the military since the first panic over “flying saucers” in the summer of 1947 (more on Roswell in a moment), and it persists to this day. Part of the impetus for a task force to study UFOs, or UFOs under the UAP name, came from a series of leaked videos, later declassified by the military, showing what appear to be unusual objects in flight.

Lost in observation

One of the more famous UAP sightings this century is the “Tic Tac,” spotted by Navy pilots flying southwest of San Diego on November 14, 2004. The pilots captured video of the object, which appeared small and cylindrical, and changed direction in flight in an unusual way. This video was officially released by the Navy in 2020, but which had found its way onto the internet in 2007, and was the centerpiece of a New York Times story about UFO sightings in 2017. New documents released by the Navy on January 13 show that formal reports of the so-called Tic Tac never made it beyond the 3rd Fleet’s chain of command, effectively leaving the report stranded within part of the Navy. 

As PopSci sister publication The War Zone notes, “the Navy and other U.S. military officials have publicly acknowledged that there were serious issues in the past with the mechanisms available, or lack thereof, through which pilots could make such reports and do so without fear of being stigmatized.” The released documents show that, indeed, the pilots faced stigma for the report afterwards.

None of that explains what the object in the “Tic Tac” video is, or what other still-unidentified phenomena might actually be. But it does suggest that the existence of an office responsible for collecting such reports has made it easier for such phenomena to be collected and analyzed, rather than kept quiet by pilots afraid of ridicule or having their judgment questioned.

Everything unidentified is new again

Part of the challenge of thinking about UFOs, and now UAPs, is that by asking people to report unusual sightings, people may interpret what they see as directly related to what they are being asked to find. Tell someone to take a walk in the woods and keep their eye out for rodent sightings, and every shadow or scurrying creature becomes a possible identification. 

The Army observation balloon that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was discovered almost a month before it was reported to local authorities. The summer of 1947, early in the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, saw a major “flying saucer” panic, as one highly publicized sighting led people across the nation to report unusual craft or objects. 

These reports eventually became the subject of study in Project Blue Book, an Air Force effort to categorize, demystify, and understand what exactly people were reporting. When the Air Force concluded Project Blue Book in 1969, it did so noting that 90 percent of UFOs were likely explainable as ordinary objects, like planets in twilight or airplanes at odd angles. 

As documents later declassified in the 1990s revealed, the military knew even more of the sightings to be explainable, such as backyard observers documenting US spy plane flights and reporting them to the government. The Roswell crash, which a military officer first identified as a flying saucer before the Army clarified a day later that it was a weather balloon, wasn’t precisely a weather balloon. The object was indeed a balloon, but it carried acoustic sensors designed to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. In other words, letting the public think an object is mysterious or unexplained is a good way of disguising something that’s explainable but should be secret.

[Related: UFO conspiracies can be more dangerous than you think]

In the decades following the conclusion of Project Blue Book, the military tried to debunk sightings, rather than catalog them. Today, the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office is to take the sightings seriously, and to encourage reporting, in case there are in fact important aircraft sightings that would otherwise be shrugged off. The advent of drones, stealth technologies, uncrewed sea vehicles, and advanced ways for someone to interfere with sensors all make it possible, if not always plausible, that a given UAP sighting could be a deliberate act by a hostile group or nation.

Still, as the report already attests, most sightings can be dismissed and known phenomena. Balloons, decades after Roswell, still catch light in unusual ways, and can look surreal on the ground.

One takeaway from the report hints that some of the phenomena could be due to people or sensors being mistaken or not working properly. “ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and AARO [All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office] operate under the assumption that UAP reports are derived from the observer’s accurate recollection of the event and/or sensors that generally operate correctly and capture enough real data to allow initial assessments,” notes the report. “However, ODNI and AARO acknowledge that a select number of UAP incidents may be attributable to sensor irregularities or variances, such as operator or equipment error.”

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If an animal passes through the forest and no one sees it, does it leave a mark? A century ago, there would be no way to pick up whatever clues were left behind. But with advancements in DNA technology, particularly environmental DNA (eDNA) detecting instruments, scientists can glean what wildlife visited an area based on genetic material in poop as well as microscopic skin and hair cells that critters shed and leave behind. For ecologists seeking to measure an ecosystem’s biodiversity as non-invasively as possible, eDNA can be a treasure trove of insight. It can capture the presence of multiple species in just one sample. 

But collecting eDNA is no easy task. Forests are large open spaces that aren’t often easily accessible (canopies, for example, are hard to reach), and eDNA could be lurking anywhere. One way to break up this big problem is to focus on a particular surface in the forest to sample eDNA from, and use a small robot to go where humans can’t. That’s the chief strategy of a team of researchers from ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, and company SPYGEN. A paper on their approach was published this week in the journal Science Robotics. 

In aquatic environments, eDNA-gathering robots sip and swim to do their jobs. But to reach the treetops, not only do researchers have to employ flying drones (which are tougher to orient and harder to protect), these drones also need to be able to perch on a variety of surfaces. 

[Related: These seawater-sipping robots use drifting genes to make ocean guest logs]

The design the Swiss team came up with looks much like a levitating basket, or maybe a miniature flying saucer. They named this 2.6-pound contraption eDrone. It has a cage-like structure made up of four arcs that extend out below the ring mainframe that measure around 17 inches in diameter. The ring and cage-like body protect it and its four propellers from obstacles, kind of like the ring around a bumper car. 

To maneuver, the eDrone uses a camera and a “haptic-based landing strategy,” according to the paper, that can perceive the position and magnitude of forces being applied to the body of the robot in order to map out the appropriate course of action. To help it grip, there are also features like non-slip material, and carbon cantilevers on the bottom of each arc. 

Once it firmly touches down, the drone uses a sticky material on each arc to peel off an eDNA sample from the tree branch and stow it away for later analysis. In a small proof-of-concept run, the eDrone was able to successfully obtain eDNA samples from seven trees across three different families. This is because different tree species have their own branch morphologies (some are cylindrical and others have more irregular branches jutting out). Different trees also host different animals and insects. 

“The physical interaction strategy is derived from a numerical model and experimentally validated with landings on mock and real branches,” the researchers wrote in the paper.  “During the outdoor landings, eDNA was successfully collected from the bark of seven different trees, enabling the identification of 21 taxa, including insects, mammals, and birds.”

Although the robot did its intended job well in these small trials, the researchers noted that there needs to be more extensive studies into how its performance may be affected by tree species beyond the ones they tested for or by changing environmental conditions like wind or overcast skies. Moreover, eDNA gathering by robot, they propose, can be an additional way to sample eDNA in forests alongside other methods like analyzing eDNA from pooled rainwater. 

“By allowing these robots to dwell in the environment, this biomonitoring paradigm would provide information on global biodiversity and potentially automate our ability to measure, understand, and predict how the biosphere responds to human activity and environmental changes,” the team wrote. 

Watch the drone in action below: 

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On December 12, Australia announced the name of its latest robotic submarine: the Ghost Shark. This vessel, which is being developed by both Anduril and Australia’s Navy and Defence Science and Technology Group, is designed as a large, underwater, autonomous machine, guided by artificial intelligence. The Ghost Shark will be a stealth robot, built for future wars at sea.

In picking the name, the Royal Australian Navy chose a moniker that conferred both stealth, and paid tribute to the wildlife of the continent, or in this case, just off the coast of the continent.

“Ghost Shark’s name comes about from actually an indigenous shark that’s found on our southern waters, indeed it’s found in deeper waters, so it’s quite stealthy, which is a good corollary to the stealthy extra large autonomous vehicle. It also keeps that linkage to the Ghost Bat, the MQ-28 program for the Air Force, which is also another quite stealthy autonomous system,” said Commodore Darron Kavanagh of the Royal Australian Navy. (Ghost sharks, the animals, are often consumed as part of fish and chips.)

The Ghost Bat drone fighter, or MQ-28 he referenced, is another recent initiative by Australia to augment crewed forces with robotic allies. While a jet is bound by the finite number of hours it can stay airborne, a robotic submarine, freed of crew, can endure under the sea for a long time.

“They have the capacity to remain at sea undetected for very long periods, carry various military payloads and cover very long distances,” Rear Admiral Peter Quinn said in a release. “The vessels will provide militaries with a persistent option for the delivery of underwater effects in high-risk environments, complementing our existing crewed ships and submarines, as well as other future uncrewed surface vessels.”

Pause for effect

“Effects” is a broad term that refers to all the ways a vehicle, tool, or weapon can make battle easier for one side and harder for its enemies. “Kinetic effects,” for example, are the missiles, torpedoes, and bullets that immediately come to mind when people think of war. But effects can include other tools, like electromagnetic jamming, or a smoke grenade detonating and creating a dense cloud to hide the movement of soldiers.

Underwater, those effects could be direct attack, like with torpedoes, or it could be sending misleading sonar signals, fooling enemy ships and submarines to target a robot instead of a more powerful crewed vessel.

In May, Anduril announced it was working on Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicles (XL-AUVs) for the Royal Australian Navy, which is what is now known as Ghost Shark.

“It is modular, customizable and can be optimized with a variety of payloads for a wide range of military and non-military missions such as advanced intelligence, infrastructure inspection, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting,” read the announcement.

In this instance, its job could include seeing enemy vessels and movements, as well as identifying targets for weapons fired from other vehicles. One of the most consistent promises from autonomous systems is that, by using sensors and fast onboard processing, these machines will be able to discover, discern, and track enemies faster than human operators of the sensor systems. If the role of the Ghost Shark is limited, at least initially, to targeting and not firing, it lets the robot submarines bypass the difficult questions and implications of a machine making a lethal decision on its own.

At the press conference this month, Quinn told the press that adversaries will have to assume that a Ghost Shark is not only watching their movements, but “is capable of deploying a wide range of effects — including lethal ones,” reports Breaking Defense. If the Ghost Shark is to be an armed robot, it will raise difficult questions about human control of lethal autonomous machines, especially given the added difficulty of real-time communication under water.

Uncrewed underwater

The Ghost Shark is just one of a growing array of large underwater drones in development by a host of nations. In the chart below, the XL-AUV references the original name for the Ghost Shark.

Before the Ghost Shark can reach the extra-large size it’s intended to have, Anduril is developing the concept on an existing robot submarine it already makes, the smaller Dive-LD. At the naming announcement, a Dive-LD with “Ghost Shark” on the side was on display, highlighting how the program will flow from one into the other.

The Dive-LD is smaller than the XL-AUV (or Ghost Shark) will be, with its 5.8 meter length between 4 and 24 meters shorter than the final design. It still is a useful starting point for developing software, techniques, and testing payloads, all with the intent of scaling the robot up to the size needed for long lasting and deep operations.

The company boasts that these submarines can operate for up to 10 days, with room to expand that endurance, and can operate at depths of up to 6,000 meters below the surface. 

Watch a video about the Ghost Shark, from the Australian Department of Defence, below:

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Hummingbirds’ tiny frames cast a huge shadow over the drone and aerial vehicle industry—their recognizable, precise flight and hovering maneuvers long used as inspiration for artificial wings and other propellers. As influential as they are, however, much of what is understood about the birds’ movements is drawn largely from flight activity observances in both real-life and artificial environments. 

That comparatively limited knowledge has been greatly expanded upon by researchers at Penn State University recently “reverse engineered” the musculoskeletal system of hummingbird wings to provide some of the best details yet regarding the tiny avian animals’ movements. Now, a wealth of new information is becoming available for designers of the next generation of drones.

To inform their new modeling method, the team utilized a combination of preexisting anatomy literature, computational fluid dynamics simulation data, and wing movement captured via micro-CT and X-ray scans. They then combined this copious information with what’s known as a genetic algorithm, an optimization program based on evolutionary strategies, to gain novel insights into some of hummingbirds’ most delicate facets of flight.

[Related: Hummingbirds routinely hit 9Gs like it’s no big deal.]

“We can simulate the whole reconstructed motion of the hummingbird wing and then simulate all the flows and forces generated by the flapping wing, including all the pressure acting on the wing,”  Bo Cheng, professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State, said in the university’s announcement earlier this month.

One of the chief discoveries from their new modeling system is that hummingbirds’ primary muscles, known (seriously) as “flight engines,” don’t simply cause wings to flap back and forth. Instead, they actually move their wings in three different directions—up and down, back and forth, as well as a twisting or pitching motion. Researchers likened the motions to tightening one’s core muscles while working out to improve agility and stability.

“They tighten their wings in the pitch and up-down directions but keep the wing loose along the back-and-forth direction, so their wings appear to be flapping back and forth only while their power muscles, or their flight engines, are actually pulling the wings in all three directions,” Cheng explained. “In this way, the wings have very good agility in the up and down motion as well as the twist motion.”

Although additional testing validation is still required, the team is confident their observations could one day positively influence future drone technological advancements that rely on more accurate hummingbird biomimicry.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

It’s 8:00 a.m. on a sunny 29 °C Saturday at Alexandra Headland on the Sunshine Coast of southeast Queensland, Australia. Swimmers porpoise through the shimmering water, while farther offshore surfers straddle their boards in anticipation of the next big wave. If anyone is worried about a shark bite, you wouldn’t know it.

“Not really, probably should,” says 18-year-old surfer Jake Hazelwood of Cairns, a city farther to the north. “When you’re out there, you just zone everything else out.”

Hazelwood is also oblivious to the drone taking off from the beach just 20 meters away, the state government’s latest tool to help keep popular coastal areas safe for humans—and safe for sharks.

For decades, Queensland has relied on nets and baited-hook drumlines to help protect beachgoers from sharks. But that safety comes at a cost to marine life. Last year alone, that equipment caught 958 animals, including 798 sharks—70 percent of which died. Sixteen turtles also perished as unintended victims along with 10 dolphins and two dugongs, a vulnerable species in Queensland. And in 2022, 15 humpback whales were caught in shark nets, though all of them were safely removed.

The government is considering replacing its lethal measures with using camera-equipped drones to search for sharks, and Alexandra Headland is one of the locations for a trial program that is already showing success.

It’s surprisingly easy to spot sharks when you fly over them, says Rob Adsett, the chief remote pilot with the Australian Lifeguard Service. “Technology is getting better.”

The infrared-equipped drone that Adsett and his colleagues used off Alexandra Headland can fly for 20 minutes in winds above 35 kilometers per hour. The pilots fly the drone along a 400-meter route parallel to shore behind the surf break. On busy beach days, the drone zips along at up to 20 kilometers per hour, staying out of the way at an altitude of 60 meters. When pilots detect a shark, they lower the drone to 30 meters so they can identify the animal’s size and species, a task that can become more difficult when it is raining or if the water is murky or rough.

If the pilots deem the shark a danger, they can evacuate the beach while lifeguards follow in inflatable boats or personal watercraft to track the animal and monitor the threat.

During their trials in 2020 and 2021, which involved 3,669 drone flights at seven beaches, drone pilots detected 174 sharks, including 48 that were greater than two meters in length. For beach users and lifeguards, the presence of big sharks, especially white, tiger, and bull sharks, is the greatest concern, and these sightings led to four beach evacuations.

Queensland’s effort is following on the heels of a similar project that has been underway in New South Wales, the state just to the south, since 2017.

For conservationists, the switch away from nets and drumlines can’t come soon enough. Any further delay in removing the lethal deterrents “is baffling,” says Leo Guida, a shark scientist with Australian Marine Conservation Society. “They’ve got the solution on the table.”

Drones, says Guida, can also save people by dropping life-saving equipment to someone struggling in the water. “You’re more likely to save someone from drowning than interacting with a dangerous animal,” he says. “There are clear benefits across the board” to having drones at the beach.

The toll of the nets and drumlines on sharks also has to be balanced against the threat sharks actually pose to beachgoers. According to Adsett, “You’ve got more of a chance of getting hit by a car on the way to the beach than getting attacked by a shark.”

Still, shark bites do happen. Though infrequent, bite rates are increasing.

The Australia Shark Incident Database recorded 1,196 shark bites in the country over the past 231 years, from 1791 to 2022. Those bites caused 250 deaths, while 723 people suffered injuries. No one was injured in the other 223 cases, which cover incidents such as bites to surfboards.

Shark bites jumped from an average of nine per year in 1990–2000 to 22 per year in 2010–2020, in part because of the increasing human population along the coast.

But even nets and drumlines, Guida argues, are no guarantee against bites because sharks can simply swim around them. That’s what happened in 2020 when a male surfer in Queensland died after being bitten at Greenmount Beach, a stretch of coastline equipped with nets and drumlines. As for whether the nets can be replaced with drones, the Queensland government has at least seen enough to continue their trials. They’ve committed to expanding the project, which will continue through June 2025 at a cost of roughly US $1.3-million per year.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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Mayhem is an odd name for a spy, but it’s a pretty good name for a superfast jet. On December 16, the Department of Defense awarded contractor Leidos $334 million to develop a hypersonic flying scout. The award is technically for the “Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and Strike program,” but it’s also known as Mayhem. It will be uncrewed—a drone.

“The Mayhem system will use a scramjet engine to generate thrust, propelling the vehicle across long distances at speeds greater than Mach 5,” Leidos said in a release.

Hypersonic is the threshold defined as five or more times the speed of sound. Many of the recent developments in hypersonic technology have focused on weapons such as missiles that fly fast to evade detection and interception. Speed is profoundly useful for a weapon, as the force of a fast impact can be tremendously deadly even without a warhead on board.

What sets Mayhem apart from more outright destructive designs is that, while still intended to be expendable, the hypersonic Mayhem is a tool more for finding out than flying around. 

ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and is generally the Pentagon’s acronym for everything involved in discovering, observing, and monitoring activity below, is a mission often associated with slow-moving vehicles. Drones, like the medium-altitude Reaper or the ultra long-endurance Global Hawk, are built to keep watch on activity below, informing how soldiers, sailors, and pilots below all respond. Yet some missions cannot be done at the ponderous speeds of Reaper’s prop engine, or wait for an overhead satellite to be in place.

It is likely in that void, where the need is urgent and the information collection is dangerous, that Mayhem will work best. 

Past is prologue

One way to understand the role the Mayhem might have is to look at the history of superfast spy planes. The most famous of these is the SR-71 Blackbirds, and its single-seat, CIA-piloted predecessor, the A-12, also known as Oxcart. Both planes were designed to take photographs without being shot down by anti-air missiles, which had advanced considerably in power and accuracy into the Cold War. The Soviet Union used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down a U-2 spy plane in 1960, and while U-2s still fly today, there are certain missions better suited for a faster vehicle. The Oxcart flew missions for the US above North Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, before it was retired. The two-seat Blackbird, with room for a pilot and a person to crew the sensors, operated into the 1990s

“The SR-71 was designed to fly deep into hostile territory, avoiding interception with its tremendous speed and high altitude. It could operate safely at a maximum speed of Mach 3.3 at an altitude more than sixteen miles, or 25,908 m (85,000 ft), above the earth,” notes the National Air and Space Museum.

The Blackbird entered service in the late 1960s, and was retired in 1998. In April 1988, a decade before the Blackbird’s retirement, Popular Science highlighted what the Air Force would want in a replacement, including a speed of Mach 5 and a service ceiling of above 100,000 feet. 

There’s a third distant predecessor to Mayhem: the D-21 supersonic drone. Launched by planes, including the B-52, four D-21s were used to take photographs of China between 1969 and 1971. The drone was designed within the limits of the technology at the time, which meant film cases that had to be ejected and recovered, before they were to be processed in a darkroom. The D-21 flew a fixed path, and then detonated after its mission. None of the four flights over China produced recoverable images, and the program was abandoned. 

Developing a new hypersonic spyplane has long been a goal of the Air Force, with reports of new concepts sprouting periodically. 

Uncrewed is good news

What might make Mayhem a better bet in 2022 than any prior attempt at a Blackbird replacement is a conflux of factors, all of which have led to improved drone technology. Removing the need for a pilot onboard a plane can shrink its overall profile, and lets the aircraft operate without the constraints of having to keep people onboard alive.

Cameras, data processing, and wireless data transfer have all improved tremendously in the past decades. The era of using film cameras for aerial surveillance finally ended this summer, and with it the constraints of having to collect or process film negatives. The cameras that make possible drone sensors, like the far-seeing pods on Global Hawks, show an industrial community proficient in far-seeing sensors, though taking pictures with clarity and at speed has its own obstacles. The Blackbird included sensors for listening and recording signals, like radar and radios, and those too could be incorporated into a hypersonic drone.

Like the D-21 before it, Mayhem can be expendable, where the loss of the drone need not mean the loss of information it collected. But expendable doesn’t have to mean that the drone is destroyed at the end of every mission, and a drone that could be recovered and reused offers a boon to military brass looking for a way to confirm reports by photography 

“This program is focused on delivering a larger class air-breathing hypersonic system capable of executing multiple missions with a standardized payload interface, providing a significant technological advancement and future capability,” is all the detail provided by the contract announcement for what Mayhem actually will do.

However Mayhem ultimately develops, it will fill a void the Air Force has left open for almost thirty years. 

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In the desert south of Death Valley, mock patients waited for drones to deliver simulated blood. California’s Fort Irwin is an Army base that hosted an event called Project Convergence 2022 from late September into November, an annual exercise led by the United States where militaries of multiple nations work together to explore new technologies in service of war. By testing drone delivery of medical supplies, in conjunction with other tech, the military is looking at ways to ensure the survival of soldiers after battle injuries, even in circumstances where it’s unsafe to send people on foot for help.

Part of Project Convergence was Project Crimson, which involved drones dropping medical relief to field medics in a simulated mass casualty scenario. 

“Project Crimson is a project to take a common unmanned air system and adapt it to support a medical mission,” said Nathan Fisher, medical robotics and autonomous systems division chief at the US Army’s Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center, in a release. “This drone supports medical field care when casualty evacuation isn’t an option. It can keep whole blood and other crucial items refrigerated in the autonomous portable refrigeration unit and take it to medics in the field with wounded warriors.”

Researchers first proved that drones could successfully deliver blood in 2015. As cargo, blood makes a lot of sense, since a small amount can be life saving, and drones can rapidly transport small cargoes as needed. In the summer of 2021, British marines tested blood delivery by drone swarm, with the dedicated resupply drones carrying everything from ammunition to blood to troops in the field. 

For Project Crimson, the army used a FVR-90 drone, a vertical takeoff and landing UAV. Two outriggers attached to the drone’s wings each feature two rotors, allowing the FVR-90 to launch and land like a quadcopter. In flight, the FVR-90 flies like a fixed-wing plane, with a front-facing propeller and its over 15-feet wide wingspan allowing for long-lasting efficient flight of up to 16 hours. The FVR-90 tops out at 74 mph, but it can carry up to 10 pounds of payload under its wings, ready to drop and deliver.

The drone “doesn’t need a catapult launch or runway to perform a lifesaving mission. This allows military personnel to preserve life in the critical phase of injury and facilitate rapid transport to an Army hospital for further treatment,” said the release.

Beyond medical delivery drones, the army tested distant communication and diagnostic tools, designed to improve the ability of field medics to observe and manage the health of injuries in the field.

One of these is the Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit, or BATDOK. It’s a smartphone app that can work with sensors placed on the patients, scanning information and then storing it for up to 25 patients per device. This information can be shared over a mesh network with other devices, or transferred via protocols like Bluetooth and WiFi, letting a field medic pass along records seamlessly for a patient at the point of transfer to better care. 

“The facility can see the patient’s status real-time using BATDOK, while the medics on ground can update treatments and medications for the patients as well. This allows the facility to be alerted, rally and prepare to treat the patient once they are transported,” explained Michael Sedillo, an integrated cockpit sensing program airman systems director with the Air Force Research Laboratory, in a press release.

As part of Project Convergence, troops carried litters of mock casualties to medical transports, with medics applying care in transit. At the field hospital, field medics and hospital staff traded records using local communications infrastructure, ensuring smooth flow of care. 

Project Convergence included participants from the British and Australian Armies, with allied nations like Canada and New Zealand observing.

Ultimately, exercises like this will improve the ability of the military to not just fight wars, but to ensure that injury on the battlefield is dealt with as best as possible. Drone resupply of medical necessities like blood can keep people in the field alive longer until reinforcements or evacuation arrives. Better data management can make sure that as little information as possible is lost when transferring care, letting medical teams move forward in treatment as conditions allow.

As robots and new data tools move into greater use on the battlefield, training on these labor-saving devices should open up the possibility for human soldiers to focus directly on the tasks of saving lives, while machines provide the tools needed to do that.

Watch a video about Project Convergence below:

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At a range in southern England, researchers tested a new laser, making it one step closer to military use. Developed for the Ministry of Defence, DragonFire is intended to be a long-range answer to incoming threats, a way to defeat projectiles in mid-air through the concentrated power of intense light. On November 8, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) announced it had conducted long-range laser trials at the Porton Down site. During the live fire test, the laser hit and neutralized a small drone at a range of 2 miles.

The laser was developed for the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). Like most laser weapons, it is a composite technology, a sum of multiple systems put together into one more functional package. This included controls and image processing from defense contractor MBDA, a beam directory to track and point at targets made by defense contractor Leonardo, and a 50-kilowatt laser built by QinetiQ. In the future, the plan is for this laser to be able to “scale fire-power levels,” likely letting the user increase or decrease power to match the target. That saves energy otherwise wasted on overkill, while ensuring the laser can defeat tougher targets when they exist. 

“The trials involve firing the UK DragonFire demonstrator at a number of targets over a number of ranges, demanding pinpoint accuracy from the beam director,” DSTL said in a release. “These tests improve the UK’s understanding of how high-energy lasers and their associated technologies can operate over distance and defeat representative targets.” 

To develop the laser, the Ministry of Defence and industry have spent “around £100 million,” or roughly $118 million dollars. Laser weapons are heavily front-loaded on cost, with the research and development expense in the name of creating a weapon that can destroy targets cheaply, relative to using high-caliber bullets, rockets, or missiles instead.

“Laser directed energy weapons have the potential to provide lower cost lethality, reduced logistical burden and increased effectiveness when compared to other weapon systems – the technology could have a huge effect on the future of defence operations,” said DSTL in the release.

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

Laser weapons work by combining and focusing powerful light, and then holding that light steady on a target until the heat of the laser can damage it. The effectiveness of the laser depends on a host of factors, from the amount of power going in, to how well the tracking system can keep the laser focused on the same part of an object. Even the location of where a laser is focused on a drone can change the speed at which it is disabled: a laser aimed at plastic casing and circuits will disable a drone much faster than a laser aimed at igniting a battery.

That means simply developing a powerful laser is not enough to ensure a quick takedown of a drone, or a missile, or other threats like mortar rounds and rocket fire. The sensors and automated tracking systems that go into laser weapons are important for reducing the amount of time a laser needs to fire per target. On the range, a laser can focus on one object without distraction, but in a realistic combat scenario, a laser may have a few seconds to disable a projectile before moving onto another. 

The Ministry of Defence has been looking to develop a laser weapon since at least 2015. One of the durable challenges of making a laser weapon is that the beam’s effectiveness can be diminished by particulates in the air, from smoke or dust or even moisture like fog and rain. The 2015 request stated that the goal was for a laser which can “detect, acquire and track targets at range and in varying weather conditions, with sufficient precision.”

Some of those conditions, like billowing dust or thick fog, are also obstacles to drone flight and sensors. But with laser weapons also taking an anti-projectile role, an inability to stop attacks in bad weather could turn a gloomy day into a grim one in combat.

[Related: The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers.]

DragonFire has been in the works since at least 2017, as a way to defeat and disable aerial targets, like drones. Drones are an ideal target, in part because they fly slow enough for lasers to track, and because there is no onboard pilot that a laser can blind. Laser weapon use against people is governed by the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, part of the Geneva Conventions on Certain Conventional Weapons, which entered into force in 1998. Both the United States and the United Kingdom are among the treaty’s 109 signatories, agreeing to not use lasers specifically to blind people in war. 

That makes DragonFire, like other laser weapons, a modern solution to a modern threat. It’s a way to stop flying robots and uncrewed enemies, protecting humans from inanimate attackers.

Watch a video about it below:

The post The UK’s DragonFire laser is designed to burn drones out of the sky appeared first on Popular Science.

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Above the town of Mailuu Suu in western Kyrgyzstan, the International Atomic Energy Agency is flying drones to monitor for radiation. For 22 years, from 1946 to 1968, people in Mailuu Suu mined and processed uranium ore for the Soviet Union. Decades later, waste still remains, and monitoring is essential to ensure that people can live safely in the environment actively contaminated by production of nuclear materials. The drone flights, captured in a video shared online November 4, are a way for new technology to ease the burden of monitoring risk.

The town of Mailuu Suu was intimately tied to the extraction of nuclear material in the Soviet Union, which meant that the town was unlisted on maps, closed to outsiders, and officially logged only as “Mailbox 200.” In the Cold War climate, where espionage was essential for superpowers tracking and estimating the size of nuclear weapons arsenals, this made some degree of sense. It also meant that the protective geography of the town, in a river valley in a region prone to landslides and earthquakes, helped keep residents in place, even as it led to risky decisions like burying waste nearby the village.

An accident in 1958

In 1958, heavy rainfall and seismic activity caused a dam failure that pushed 14 million cubic feet of radioactive waste into the Maylu-Suu river that runs through the town. Downstream, the river flows into the Ferghana valley of Central Asia, an area split between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and a region home to 14 million people. The 1958 disaster contaminated the river and areas downstream, leaving a visceral legacy in the memories of those who witnessed it.

The concern for the town, the government of Kyrgyzstan, and international observers, is that such a disaster could strike again. Much of the waste from the site exists in “tailings,” or the sludge left over from extracting uranium ore and processing it with chemicals. In addition to the 23 sites of tailings, there are 13 sites of radioactive rock around the city. Climate change can cause a shift in rain patterns and an increase in storm severity, exacerbating the risk posed by these sites to the whole region.

Eventually, remediation will be needed to tackle all of the sites, ensuring they no longer pose a threat to people in the area or elsewhere. Before that, there is the constant work of monitoring the waste, which has traditionally been done by humans on foot or, rarely, helicopters. Now, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVS) or drones are being brought to bear on the problem.

“The tailor-made UAV-based gamma spectrometer will make it possible for experts to explore sites without the need to trek through difficult terrain with lots of gear,” Sven Altfelder, an IAEA remediation safety specialist, said in a June 2021 release. “By using the UAV to conduct monitoring duties, experts in the region will be able to easily gather the necessary data quickly, while avoiding potential physical and radiological risks altogether.”

A good job for a drone

Drone monitoring reduces the labor and risk of checking out the area on foot. Thanks to the ability of drone-borne sensors to carry and upload data, it also allows for a more complete picture of radioactive risk and sites, mapped in three dimensions by the flying robot.

Another perk is that drones can detect new or unmarked sites, since thorough scanning of the region by air makes it easier to find mislabeled or unknown waste sites. Drone piloting is also easier and cheaper than using crewed aircraft, and drone pilot training has fewer hurdles than that of pilots who actually fly inside the craft they operate.

The technology was tested in Germany in 2020, showing that the drone can produce a reliable and accurate radiation map of partially remediated sites. This work was funded by the European Union and the German government, which has a specific tie to Mailuu Suu. When the town was set up as a closed community in 1946, among the people relocated to work in it were ethnic Germans, alongside Crimean Tatars and Russian soldiers who had surrendered during World War II.

[Related: Why do nuclear power plants need electricity to stay safe?]

With proof that the drone can be used to successfully monitor the sites in Kyrgyzstan, the hope is that experts in the country, and other Central Asian countries, can be trained to take on the work. The project is supported by the governments of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

“We will be able to use the results obtained by the UAV to explain remediation results to the local population and demonstrate that those areas are now safe,” said Azamat Mambetov, State Secretary of the Kyrgyzstan Ministry of Emergency Situations, in the June release.

The drone monitoring will aid in guiding remediation and proving its success. This, in turn, could expand possibilities in the region, with some hope from the IAEA that a remediated and safe Mailu Suu could not just stop being a risk, but could even become a destination for travelers and tourists, eager to behold the natural beauty.

Watch a video about it below:

The post How drones are helping monitor Kyrgyzstan’s radioactive legacy appeared first on Popular Science.

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A typical hobbyist drone is made by assembling electronic parts on frames made of carbon fiber or plastic. But as these flying machines continue to proliferate, it’s worth remembering that drones can come in many forms.

As an extreme case, consider a drone recently shared on Twitter. The quadcopter looks like it was assembled on a dare. With a body made of six sticks, the drone is little more than rotors, wires, and a control unit wrapped around an ultra minimalist frame. A caption on it reads, in Arabic, “Yemeni makes aircraft from stalks of qat.” For at least a few seconds, the drone flies, soaring overhead.

Here it is, in action: 

The drone is a reminder that such devices can actually be pretty simple. “I think the biggest benefit of this design is that once key materials are available – a battery, a receiver, several small motors, propellers and wiring – such a drone can be essentially assembled ‘on the fly,’ pun intended,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security.

What’s striking is how this drone distills the aircraft down to minimum parts. The wee flying machine is motors, writes, controls, and something it can all stick to. In this case, literal sticks, or stems from the qat plant.

“Obviously, some experience building and flying such quadcopters is helpful in making sure the drone can be properly stabilized, but a lot of those requirements and knowledge is freely available online as well,” says Bendett. “The main point of this video is that the quadcopter frame can be assembled from any products freely available. And the rest of the components can be relatively easily procured or even built/3D printed if necessary.”

Spare parts

The modern drone market is built on complete, packageable products. These are made by a variety of companies, though China’s DJI has long been the industry leader in low cost and mass production of capable drones. DJI drones have such a durable presence that, when Popular Science took part in a laser weapon demonstration in October, their drones were the targets.

As such a large player in the commercial space, DJI’s products end up in military use, which led the company to ban sales in both Ukraine and Russia after the latter invaded the former in February. The ready-made drones are the easiest and fastest way to get scouts into the sky. But as the Yemen-made stick-drone illustrates, the whole can be made from a handful of parts.

ISIS, the theocratic insurgency that for a few years controlled territory in Syria and Iraq, was able to build its own drones. These aircraft, largely fixed-wing (or miniature plane-like), employed plywood and styrofoam for their bodies. Guidance systems came from electronics supply shops, designed to go into DIY drone kits. By tapping into the same market, and getting parts from markets out of territory they controlled, ISIS was able to outfit its own drones from the same broader supply chain that makes mass-produced drones possible.

Food that flies

What stands out about the stick drone is the minimalism of its design, replacing bulky plastic with sticks destined for disposal. Another alternative, as presented in a recent robotics conference, is to make a drone where the wings themselves are cargo, consumable on delivery.

In this case, the drone’s wings are made of rice cakes.

“The researchers designed the wing of this partially edible drone out of compressed puffed rice (rice cakes or rice cookies, depending on whom you ask) because of the foodstuff’s similarity to expanded polypropylene (EPP) foam. EPP foam is something that’s commonly used as wing material in drones because it’s strong and lightweight; puffed rice shares those qualities,” writes Evan Ackerman of IEEE Spectrum.

By cutting rice cakes into hexagons, and then binding them together with edible gelatin, the researchers were able to make a foam-like wing. The electronics of this drone included a rotor, engine, control surfaces on the tail, and a battery. With the rice cakes packed in plastic and attached to the electronics as the wing, the drone is an airborne breakfast for one, designed as air-deliverable rescue rations.

Sticks and drones

While militaries will stick with equipment built for the purpose, the ability to turn a small amount of electronics into a flying machine kit with only a few found materials opens up possibilities for drone operation. In the field, it’s easy to imagine soldiers with a spare parts kit adapting those parts to make a new drone if their built unit is too broken to work. Even if all the spare drone does is make a noise and a distraction, the option for a little unexpected movement directed remotely could be useful, distracting hostile forces while seeking cover or escape. 

With field-assembly of drones as an objective, kits could be designed to work for forces that have to travel light, with an understanding that the drone will be assembled from foraged materials as needed. If a stick-kit drone is designed to be expendable, then the careful considerations of balancing an airframe for hundreds of hours of flight become secondary. Instead, a minimalist drone, built on trash, just needs to fly for a moment, useful until it crashes down and returns to rubbish.

The post A drone made out of sticks? In the UAV space, anything flies. appeared first on Popular Science.

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Before I could lock the laser weapon’s crosshairs on the DJI Phantom drone, I had to make sure it was in the right position. With the drone against a cloudless blue sky, the weapon’s sensors could clearly see and track it, but hard-coded rules of engagement prevented the weapon from firing until the target had an earthen backdrop. Light travels far, and we don’t want to accidentally zap the wrong thing that’s far away.

The target drone’s pilot directed the Phantom below the horizon line, with some landmass behind it. On the laptop in front of me, I placed a tracker marker just to the side of the drone, a push of the left joystick of an Xbox controller fixing the tracker to the target. With a slight nudge of the right joystick, I moved my crosshairs onto one of the quadcopter’s rotors, and then held the trigger. The Phantom lit up on the infrared view, and 15 seconds later it crashed down, the molten plastic of the rotor arm bending on impact.

I set the controller down and an engineer flicked the “armed” switch to the off position. It was my first time firing a laser weapon.

The 10-kilowatt laser in question was a High-Energy Laser Weapon System built by Raytheon, and I was invited by the company to observe it in operation at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, part of New Mexico Tech, in Socorro, New Mexico. 

To get to the range, we had to take a four-wheel drive vehicle onto the dirt roads, about six miles behind Socorro Peak. While New Mexico Tech has its origin in mining, its proximity to White Sands Missile Range (and the availability of EMRTC itself) have kept other defense contractors, like Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne, as range tenants.

Some of what is tested at the range is explosives. The shape, composition, and aerodynamics of artillery can all be studied through live fire. On the other side of the ridge from where Raytheon has set up its work station came the unmistakable thunder of artillery. Around the testing area were several M110 Howitzers, artillery pieces on treads that the US retired in 1994. 

This old artillery, juxtaposed against a field demonstration of lasers disabling drones, illustrated one of the realities of modern warfare. Artillery can remain effective for decades after it enters service, but drone scouts are changing how armies move and fight, and how armies direct artillery fire, too. The lasers are a reaction to those drones, and an attempt to make drone destruction simple, effective, and in the long run, affordable.

As we arrived on site, past the weathered cannons, I disembarked from the SUV and saw a launch zone of roughly ten or so DJI Phantom 4s. Depending on the model, these drones can cost up to $3,500 each. That’s on the higher end of DJI’s commercial offerings, but an order of magnitude cheaper than the most bare-bones drones designed for military use. At the range, these Phantoms were lined up like clay pigeons, waiting their turn in the sky before being shot down. 

Frying these drones would be a pair of High Energy Laser Weapon Systems (HELWS), made by Raytheon. One was mounted on the back of a Polaris MRZR, a military grade dune buggy. The MRZR still had the two front seats, and in the back sat the power supply and targeting system for the HELWS. Next to the buggy-mounted laser weapon was an identical system, only this one was on the bed of a large truck. In the field, HELWS is designed to be battery powered, but for today each was running off a portable generator, burning gasoline.

Cost comparison

A relatively small amount of fuel would power the two lasers in use that day for the whole of their operations. By the end of the day, 10 DJI Phantom 4s would lie, collected, in various states of destruction. At roughly $3,000 apiece, depending on the model, that’s $30,000 in drones destroyed for roughly what it takes to fill up a small car.

This cost disparity, between cheap drones and even cheaper laser takedowns, is an explicit reason for developing laser weapons. Current means of destroying drones in the field can risk overkill, and come with various drawbacks.

“It has to be a cost-effective solution for soldiers to be able to use it,” said Annabel Flores, chief operating officer of Global Spectrum Dominance at Raytheon Intelligence and Space. “It makes no sense to shoot something that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars or a million-dollar missile into something that’s a thousand dollars.”

In 2017, a US ally reportedly fired a Patriot anti-air missile at a hobbyist quadcopter. Patriot missiles are designed to intercept cruise missiles and airplanes, and they cost about $3 million apiece. Patriots are also made by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and while the missile was effective against the drone, the cost difference is so great it was at best a Pyrrhic victory. It’s like killing a mosquito using a grenade.

“That’s just the wrong side of the cost equation that you wanna be on,” said Flores. “What fundamentally drove us down this path is that this is a real need and a real solution.”

The cost of each laser activation is only part of the equation. Raytheon has been awarded at least $52.4 million to develop and deliver HELWS systems to the Department of Defense. Those prototypes and models have been put through the paces, with deployments outside the United States and 25,000 hours operational hours. 

“The next step for us is really being prepared so that it’s not just a cool demonstrator, a cool prototype, but these are producible systems that assembly technicians are putting together today,” said Flores. “Originally physicists were the ones that were working with lasers, then it became engineers while we were doing these proofs. Now it’s assembly technicians that are pulling these systems together.”

What I saw on the monitor in front of me

On the drive to the range, my hosts asked if I play video games. It’s been a decade since I really spent time on a first-person shooter, but there’s a muscle memory to video game controllers that persists. The controls for the laser were set up inside a nearby trailer with plywood walls, but they could fit into a backpack easily.  Firing the HELWS laser is done through a program running on a laptop, which is fed information by ethernet or fiber-optic cord. In my hand, controlling the turret and the laser, was the plug-in Xbox controller.

The laptop’s screen was divided into quadrants of different sizes. In the upper-left, there’s a wide view from the electro-optical camera, showing a slice of surrounding terrain. In a smaller window on the upper right is a narrower view, looking down the “sight line” of the laser. (More on that in a moment.) Below the narrow view is a compass on a map, showing the direction the vehicle is facing, the orientation of the laser, and when designated, any targets in view. That quadrant also has columns for “cues” that the camera can quickly pivot to, which could be predetermined points to focus on or could be new drones added to the system by sensors. 

In the bottom-left of the screen was a landscape-oriented photographic panorama of the area surrounding the laser. This image was captured by the camera pod, and it has layered data on top. A bright red line traces the horizon, hard-coding a boundary that, for this range on this shoot, the laser is not permitted to fire above. In a cluster, beneath a high slope, sit several green rectangles, marking fields of vision and fire zones. Within those settings, the laser turrets can track and then fire and melt drones, but above the horizon line or outside the box, the trigger pull on the laser won’t work. 

This capability, which was set by other menus, is useful on the training range, and has applications in the field. A laser deployed to protect a power plant, say, may want to be hard-coded with certain areas as off-limits, to be absolutely sure the laser doesn’t hit infrastructure by accident. 

Arming the laser

Before firing the laser, it needs to be armed. A safety interlock box with two toggles lets users turn on the laser weapon, and turn on a laser illuminator, which is distinct from the laser weapon. The illuminator is used for targeting, but can also cause harm and disorientation if pointed in a person’s eyes. To ensure that the laser cannot be set up without command authorization, the toggles can be locked off by a key, carried by a commander.

With the controller in hand, targeting the laser is something like playing a video game, though one where the difficulty of aiming in infrared is hard to ignore, rather than eased for sake of playability. Once an object is designated as a target, the turret can follow it well, but zooming around to find the object can be tricky, especially against the juniper-speckled hills of the high desert.

In the field and at other ranges, optical identification can be aided by radar data, which can ping and track new drones arriving within range. With this, a laser gunner can “Slew to Cue,” or toggle between tracked objects the way a remote flicks between favorite channels.

Firing the laser

The laser of the HELWS is housed in the body beneath the turret, and it points upwards at a lens that focuses it. This orientation also lets a camera point in the same direction, giving the video feed a perspective that’s equivalent to looking down the barrel of a gun, though the laser has no barrel and is not a gun. 

The HELWS laser is built into an existing Raytheon camera and laser designator pod. Remove the laser weapon, and the pod’s infrared and electro-optical cameras, as well as the laser illuminator, can be found on vehicles like Predator drones and C-130 planes. The illuminator can seem redundant, but in action it can even out the image on the camera while the laser weapon itself is powered on. In the infrared view, the heat of the laser distorts the target, a bright glowing spot over what was once clearly drone features. With the illuminator, the heat appears washed out, and the laser on the target can clearly be seen. 

The laser has an effective range of 3 kilometers, or just over 1.8 miles. The speed at which the laser can burn through a target depends on a host of factors, not least of which is the air itself. Had the day been rainy, or windy and dusty, the visit would have been rescheduled, as the particles in the air can hinder its function. The laser’s time to destroy a target is also determined by the steadiness of its focus, the wattage of the weapon, and the material of what it was firing against.

To get a feel for the laser before firing it at drones, some targets were set on a board, with another board on a stand behind it. These included inert 20mm rounds with rubber tips, mock grenades, cans of energy drinks and soda and, later, an ammunition box. One of the 20mm rounds lit like a candle under the laser fire, as the heat from the metal moved upward to burn off part of the rubber tip. The soda cans popped and drained, thin metal heating quickly and bursting outwards. The empty ammo box burned open in seconds. The grenades were uneventful. The cement backing of the board behind the objects melted, cement and fiber looking glassy, crystalline upon examination afterwards.

Against drones, the key factor for how long a takedown took was what part of the drone was hit. Battery casings took the longest. A clean shot into the hull and electronics could down a drone in 8-10 seconds. My long shot on the rotor, which melted part of one arm, was the slowest of the day, at 15 seconds.

Modern weapons for modern battlefields

Ultimately, it’s hobbyist drones used as cameras that have sustained the Pentagon’s interest in the HELWS and weapons like it. Prior to drones, aerial surveillance was expensive, requiring planes or helicopters, and could be neutralized with expensive weapons. Now camera drones, even ones cheap enough to buy at a store, are useful enough that forces fighting on both sides in Ukraine see them as essential. The drones can scout, sometimes even attack, and guide artillery fire. In real time, soldiers operating long-range weapons can see not just where to shoot, but the impact of a shot after the dust settles. The lasers, mounted on trucks and buggies, are a way to prevent that, to incapacitate drones and leave foes without that information in the field.

Throughout the day, the boom of artillery would occasionally interrupt conversation, adding extra ambience. The laser testing facility was, ultimately, a trailer and a few four-wheel drive vehicles, parked on a hill with some porta-potties and sparse bunkers. The landscape was beautiful, especially at a distance. Worn and rusted metal collected in certain spots, and hardy plants with sticky seeds dug into everything.

We drove away from the site around 4 o’clock. Behind, in the dirt waiting to be carted out, were the molten husks of several once-useful flying robots.

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On October 21, the Asian American Journalists Association, together with Military Veterans in Journalism, put forth guidelines urging “newsrooms to refrain from use of the Japanese word ‘kamikaze’ to describe the self-detonating Iranian-made drones that Russia is using to conduct attacks in Ukraine.” The letter came in light of a flurry of news stories using the term to describe attacks like a recent one in Ukraine, where Russian forces fired Shahed-136s at military targets and civilian buildings. 

When a Shahed-136 hits, sometimes people die, but a pilot on the weapon never does, because it’s uncrewed.

“‘Kamikaze’ is a Japanese word that translates to ‘divine wind,’ and is commonly used to refer to the Empire of Japan’s military pilots who were ordered to go on suicide missions during World War II, purposely crashing aircraft loaded with explosives onto targets, such as U.S. Navy ships,” reads the guidance. 

With modern loitering munitions—in this case, loitering means the ability to fly around before it impacts a target, if it does—a guidance system, or sometimes a remote operator, makes the decision to aim the uncrewed explosive into a building, vehicle, or people, selected as a target. Yet the term “kamikaze drone” has stuck, with multiple outlets using it in headlines. In 2010, when Popular Science was covering the early development of the Switchblade, it referred to the prototype as both a “Flying Assassin Robot” and “Kamikaze Suicide Drones.” 

Another variation, used by news orgs and manufacturers like Switchblade-maker Aerovironment, is “Suicide Drone.” This lacks the same historical or cultural stigma attached to the word “kamikaze,” but also describes a process that does not happen when the drone detonates, because there is no human on board to die by suicide. 

In place of the term, the guidance from AAJA and the veterans organization suggests “self-detonating drones.”

“Kamikaze attacks have nothing to do with modern drone warfare, and there is no good reason for reporters to reference a previous historical warfighting tactic in this context,” Russell Midori, president of Military Veterans in Journalism, said in the statement. “Instead, we recommend using language that more accurately explains how this new technology impacts present-day conflicts.”

“Self-detonating drones” is not an especially remarkable term, though it captures an essential part of what separates this kind of weapon from others. These weapons fly like drones, and they blow up like missiles. 

History: loitering munitions and self-detonating drones

In 1918, the Kettering Bug was built for action in World War I, but never saw it. It was an early ancestor of drones and guided missiles, and was dubbed an “aerial torpedo,” matching the water-based weapons that would seek out ships by means of rudimentary guidance. The Kettering Bug itself would follow a gyroscope for navigation and then would fly a predetermined distance, before shedding its wings and crashing its explosive-containing body into the ground.

The Kettering Bug is useful as a way to understand where drone and missile development diverged. With missiles, engineers and weapon designers regularly improved the guidance and navigation systems, creating a weapon that could fly itself to a target accurately and then explode on arrival. Drones, instead, were developed as remotely controlled systems. 

In World War II, the United States also converted some B-17 bombers to be remotely controlled drone bombs, which were directed from pilots in other bombers flying nearby. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, the older brother of future president John F. Kennedy, died in 1944 while flying a mothership when the drone bomb B-17 it was commanding detonated mid-flight.

As remote control and guidance systems improved, more kinds of drone bombs became possible, blurring the once-clear division between missiles and drones. The Harpy, developed by Israel, is one of the earliest “loitering munitions,” a drone-shaped missile that can detonate into a target, but one that can also be called off from an attack and flown for another mission. 

In short, once fired, missiles fly towards a target and then explode, while drones in the form of loitering munitions can seek out a target in flight, and then be directed to attack or not. And of course, drones not built as munitions can also be used for more traditional tasks, such as intelligence-gathering or launching small missiles. 

Why rename the weapons now?

Loitering munitions and self-detonating drones are in the news because they are being actively used as tools of war. The Switchblade, made by Aerovironment, is a short-range loitering munition that the United States has provided to Ukrainian forces, as they resist the invasion by Russia. Switchblades were first deployed in 2012, though coverage on the use of drones by the US largely focused on larger, Predator- and Reaper-sized drones. Switchblade’s role as a specific weapon given as aid against the invasion, along with the development of the newer “Phoenix Ghost” loitering munition, has given the weapons newfound prominence.

Russia continues to use Iranian-made Shahed-136s against Ukraine. These weapons reportedly cost about $20,000, and so many have been fired in the war that the Ukrainian Air Force can claim it shot down at least 200 of them. The weapons have joined long-range missile attacks as a way for Russia to strike deeper into the country.

Whenever a Shahed crashes to the ground, it’s a hazard and almost certainly a tragedy for all those caught in its blast. The people who perish after such an attack are its targets. The machine, never alive, does not die when it completes its objective.

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Every October, the Association of the United States Army hosts an exposition in Washington, DC, where arms makers from across the globe gather to showcase the latest vehicles and weapons. On offer at the 2022 conference was a new and quintessentially modern type of vehicle: a rugged military truck with a launcher for loitering munitions, which are drone-shaped guided missiles that can (as their name implies) loiter, or spend time circling an area before crashing into a target. The idea was so compelling, it showed up on the floor at least twice. In one case, the F72-U Hero-120, made by Flyer Defense, mounts a loitering munition launcher on the back of the company’s F-72 utility truck. And in another, made by AM General, the HUMVEE Saber Blade features a loitering munition launcher on the back of a HUMVEE vehicle.

The existence of both vehicles suggests that there is special value in this kind of composite technology. Both models are working with existing, known, and reliable trucks as platforms. Adding loitering munition launchers to the back creates a new vehicle, one that can launch weapons at distance and with accuracy, before moving away. 

These developments are taking place in light of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, where artillery and drones have both had a major impact on how forces fight. For example, the HIMARS, a US-made and supplied rocket artillery truck, mounts a sophisticated launcher on the back of a vehicle, letting crews fire at a target and then drive away before retaliation. 

In a pinch, both options from Flyer Defense and AM General suggest the ability for an army to use loitering munitions in much the same way that a HIMARs employs rockets. A vehicle-mounted launcher gives flexibility for advance and firing, as well as mobility to relocate after launch.

Flyer assault

The F72-U Hero-120 is built around the ability to fire Hero-120 loitering munitions. These winged missiles, made by Mistral and UVision, have a range of at least 25 miles, and can carry a 10-pound warhead. The Hero-120s can also fly for up to 60 minutes, powered by their onboard electric motor. This also lets the missiles be called off after launch, in case the situation changes or the target is no longer relevant, which is one of the more crucial distinctions between loitering munitions and unrecoverable missiles. 

As displayed, Flyer’s vehicle can transport 10 of the weapons, with four ready to launch and six stowed.

The Marine Corps has already selected Hero-120s as a loitering munition to pair with Organic Precision Fires-Mounted requirement. The goal of that program is to arm a vehicle that can travel with marines, while also expanding the range of what those marines can target beyond that of infantry-carried weapons. 

Saber rattling

Also on display, and following a similar template, is the HUMVEE Saber Blade. Made by AM General, the Saber Blade also features a remote-control weapon station and counter-drone system, made by Hornet. This includes airburst ammunition and a special drone-specific detection sensor.

“The current conflicts have demonstrated the increasing importance of drones, whether to target vehicles or for reconnaissance missions. Being able to detect and defeat such threats while maintaining the vehicle’s primary protective capacity is the ultimate capability for a Remote Control Weapon Station,” Jean Boy, managing director of Hornet, said in a release.

Drones, from hobbyist models to dedicated military machines, have been a regular feature of the Ukraine Donbas war since 2014. In that conflict, drones often scouted static positions, or on occassion dropped small bombs. When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, both sides began using drones in far more extensive ways. Armed drones have been used to hunt tanks. Small quadcopters have been used to guide infantry and artillery fire, to the point where soldiers fighting without quadcopters in their formations felt like “blind kittens.” 

The Saber Blade vehicle can not just defend itself against drones, it can also launch Switchblade 300 and Switchblade 600 loitering munitions, which its maker AM General describes as “loitering precision strike missiles for use against non-line-of-sight targets.”

Loitering munitions

Loitering munitions, like drones, are an increasingly common presence on modern battlefields. Russia has launched attacks on Kyiv using Iranian-supplied Shahed-136 loitering munitions. These weapons can complement missile barrages or rocket attacks. The history of modern artillery development suggests that the weapons can be used for precision strikes, as well as wider destruction.

While it will likely be some time before these vehicles can be adopted and integrated into modern forces, the promise is for accurate, beyond line of sight fire that leans on the kind of sensors and navigation already inherent in loitering munitions. Equipping mobile formations with loitering munitions mounted from trucks lets soldiers fight enemies at greater distances, with weapons that can, as designed, hit just the specific vehicles, enemies, or buildings targeted.

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When it comes to equipping the aircraft carriers of the 21st century, the US Navy wants a mix of aircraft that is at least 60-percent uncrewed. This goal was “outlined by multiple officials during updates at the annual Tailhook Association symposium in September,” reports Aviation Week, referring to the conference held by a fraternal order of Naval Aviators, the pilots who presently and previously performed the kind of job that the Navy intends to shift mostly to robots.

The Navy has made no secret of its intentions to move towards more uncrewed aircraft flying on and off of carriers. In March 2021, Vice Adm. James Kilby told the House Armed Services committee that “we think we could get upwards of 40 percent of the aircraft in an air wing that are unmanned and then transition beyond that.”

Shifting from 40 to 60 percent is a substantial leap, though it’s of a piece with the overarching strategy for how the Navy intends to incorporate and expand the use of uncrewed vehicles in the coming decades. In the 2022 Navigation Plan, the Navy’s longer-term procurement strategy document, the Navy said that by the 2040s it is planning to field “Aircraft for anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, to include helicopters and maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, all augmented by unmanned aviation systems” with a capacity goal of “approximately 900.”

For the Navy, much of its uncrewed aviation plans hinge on the continued success of the MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone. The Stingray’s mission is to take off from a carrier deck, and travel with fighters like the F/A-18 jets part of the way to their mission. Then, the Stingray is supposed to top off the fuel tanks of the jets while they’re already airborne, extending the functional range of those fighters. This is a mission at present performed by specially equipped F/A-18s, but switching the refueling to a specialized uncrewed aircraft would free up the crewed fighter for other missions.

In June 2021, a Stingray successfully transferred fuel from an external storage tank to a fighter in flight for the first time, and testing of the aircraft continues, with the Navy expecting the drones to enter service in 2026. While not as flashy as the combat missions Navy drones may someday fly, the tanker missions require mastering the ability to take off from and land on carrier decks, as well as the ability for an uncrewed vehicle to coordinate with human pilots in close contact while airborne. If the airframe and its autonomous systems can accomplish that, then adapting the form to other missions, like scouting or attack, can come in the future. 

Adding uncrewed aircraft can potentially increase the raw numbers of flying machines fielded, as autonomous systems are not limited by the availability or capacity of human pilots. The uncrewed aircraft can also be designed from the start without a need to accommodate human pilots, letting designers build airframes without having to include space for not just cockpits but the pilot safety systems, like ejection seats, oxygen, and redundant engines. 

By saving the labor of piloting by shifting towards autonomy, and saving space on an aircraft carrier through denser uncrewed design, roboting wingmates could allow ships to put more flying machines into the sky, without needing to have a similar expansion in pilot numbers or carrier decks. 

[Related: The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels]

The Navy’s intention has parallels across the Department of Defense. In September, DARPA announced ANCILLARY, a program looking for a versatile drone that could fly from rugged environments and ship decks, without any need for additional infrastructure. GAMBIT, a program by defense contractor General Atomics, is pitched to the Air Force as a way to develop four different drone models from one single core design, allowing cost savings and versatility with shared parts.

Beyond those speculative programs, the Air Force has worked to develop semi-autonomous drones that can receive orders from and fly in formation with human-piloted planes. This Loyal Wingmate program is aimed at expanding the number of aircraft, and in turn sensors and weapons, that can be flown in formation, again without expanding the number of pilots needed. It also allows the Air Force to develop a rotating cast of uncrewed aircraft around existing crewed fighters, with hoped-for shorter production timelines and rapid deployment of new capabilities once they’re developed.

[Related: A guide to the Gambit family of military drones and their unique jobs]

The Navy’s ultimate vision, one suggested at 40 percent uncrewed and necessitated at 60 percent, is that the new robotic planes perform well enough to justifying their place in carrier storage, while also being expendable enough that they can take the brunt of risk in any conflict, sparing human pilots from exposure to enemy anti-aircraft weaponry. A shot-down pilot is a tragedy. A shot-down drone is just lost equipment and the ensuing paperwork.

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On September 19, defense giant General Atomics unveiled four related drone concepts, all under the family name of Gambit. The program, which was first announced in March, aims to take advantage of the possibilities afforded to uncrewed design, allowing several distinct aircraft to be built around a single core. Drones based on the Gambit Core would then join fighter wings and missions, under the direction of human pilots in F-35s or newer fighters, all working towards the same end.

The heart of the Gambit, as General Atomics says, is a “core platform that encapsulates a single set of common hardware: landing gear, baseline avionics, chassis, and other essential functions. A common Gambit Core accounts for roughly 70 percent of the price among the various models, providing an economy of scale to help lower costs, increase interoperability, and enhance or accelerate the development of variants.”

General Atomics, in its announcement, explicitly compares this to the assembly line style of automotive manufacture, in which both luxury sedans and family economy models start from the same base and then deviate only later in production. Gambit is pitched explicitly as a suite of useful drones, which will offer four useful versions and come in a line that can be expanded as production evolves.

Common core for four

The four initial Gambit models, as pitched, come complete with sketchpad-style illustrations. General Atomics announced them as each having a number, and each one is also intended to have a specific focus. Together, they will allow the military to use drones for everything from scouting to combat to advanced training to stealth missions.

Gambit 1

This is a scout and surveillance drone. This scout Gambit will take the core package and add “high aspect wings and a fuel-optimized engine,” letting it “spend more time patrolling a given box of airspace to provide early warning or surveillance.” This is the role most familiar to the pattern of drones like the Reaper or Global Hawk, made by General Atomics and Northrop Grumman respectively, though as described the scout Gambit is intended to watch for enemy planes, in addition to any watching movements below on the ground.

Gambit 2

This is an air-to-air fighter. This fighter drone will have less endurance than the long range scout. Instead, it will fight in packs, with sensors shared between multiple fighter-Gambits, all using shared signals to triangulate and find even stealthy targets. General Atomics says that this group could do multiple tasks: “They could alert human-piloted fighters farther away with a burst transmission. They could wave off to keep clear of the hostile fighter. They could attack with their own weapons using AI and machine learning to harass and trap the hostile fighter.” This theoretically lets drone aircraft be on the bleeding edge of a fight, with commanding human supervisors able to respond after the drones have already detected a hostile enemy.

Gambit 3

This aircraft is a training tool, a drone that will be able to emulate the powerful sensors of a modern crewed stealth fighter and pretend to be something it’s not, all without requiring actual pilots to fly training missions and masquerade as enemies. Training work is important and time-intensive, and the Air Force is already invested in using AI to evaluate pilots and pilot technique. Tools that are especially effective at training, like the Angry Kitten electronic warfare suite, can end up adapted to frontline service.

Gambit 4

Last but not least, this model is “a combat reconnaissance-focused model with no tail and swept wings,” which in the sketch resembles the flying wing B-2 bomber or the uncrewed RQ-170 drone. The General Atomics release for this drone is the least descriptive, offering only that the stealth Gambit is “optimized for long-endurance missions of a specialized nature, leveraging low-observable elements and other advanced systems for avoiding enemy detection.” As the B-2 and RQ-170 indicate, that kind of stealth is useful for bombing targets despite the presence of air defenses, or for surveillance in areas where another plane would risk getting shot down or being detected.

Teaming with possibilities

When General Atomics president David Alexander announced Gambit in March, he said that “Gambit will usher in a new era, where UAS [uncrewed aircraft systems] work collaboratively with manned aircraft to detect, identify and target adversaries at range and scale across the battlespace.”

The drone family is designed to work with and around existing and new crewed aircraft, letting autonomy take over many of the tasks presently done by remote pilots. Instead of multiple analysts gathering around a video feed from a drone while a remote crew steers it and directs sensors, the Gambit family is envisioned as self-sufficient but under human direction. That allows the fighter pilots in the sky to focus on missions, like clearing out anti-air missiles or intercepting enemy jets, without devoting their full energy and mental capacity to shepherding drones.

With programs like the Loyal Wingman, the Air Force has already indicated an interest in drone escorts for future fighters, and has worked with multiple contractors on designs that meet this need. Gambit, at a minimum, suggests that the defense industry is interested in providing whole families of potential drone escorts.

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In an animated video released on September 7, a glistening silver-white drone flies towards a modest warship. The drone turns 90 degrees vertically, its rotors allowing it to descend gradually as its wings pivot at elbow joints to take up only a fraction of the ship’s helipad. Made by DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, this is the vision of a new drone program called ANCILLARY, an acronym that comes, not quite naturally, from the phrase “AdvaNced airCraft Infrastructure-Less Launch And RecoverY.”

To scout and resupply the battlefields of the future, DARPA is asking companies to design compact, useful, vertical-takeoff-and-landing drones that can fly from ships or unprepared clearings. On Sept. 20, DARPA is hosting a “Proposers Day,” for traditional and non-traditional military aircraft makers to explore creating this new drone.

ANCILLARY is an X-Plane program, making it more akin to past experiments in aviation that demonstrated concepts of flight design more than outright designed aircraft for production. Inside the clunky acronym, the term “Infrastructure-Less” refers to the ability to launch and recover a drone without runways or special equipment, which would be a big boon for uncrewed aircraft. Presently, vertical takeoff or landing are small, like quadcopters, and limited in what they can carry.

Many ship-launched fixed-wing drones, which boast useful range for sea scouting, launch from rails, and land by crashing into nets or catching skyhooks on approach. That kit of rail launch and hook or net can be set up on land, but requires at minimum a truck to transport it around. It also takes up space and uses time and effort from the crew, at sea or on land, making it a more labor intensive process than simply landing.

With ANCILLARY, DARPA says it wants to develop and flight test “critical technologies required for a leap ahead in vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), low-weight, high-payload, and long-endurance capabilities,” with the goal of building “a plane that can launch from ship flight decks and small austere land locations in adverse weather without launch and recovery equipment typically needed for these systems.”

Because this is the earliest stage of the project, the actual shape and design of the drones sought is likely to change from the concept. What is clear, at least in the video demonstration, is the kind of missions these drones will be called on to perform. 

In one scene, the ANCILLARY drone descends onto a marked-out landing zone on a road through a jungle. The landing indicators are a handful of lights, and next to them sit soldiers in dark uniforms that suggest a night mission by special operations forces. While the squad provides armed overwatch (looking out for enemies with weapons drawn), one member unloads a cylinder of supplies, and another prepares to send the drone on a return mission with a quick command on the tablet. 

The concept video shows ANCILLARY drones flying in teams, cameras and other sensors pointed below to surveil an archipelago, all while staying in communication with the small ship that launched the scouts. DARPA is service-agnostic, but the scenario described is likely for the US Navy in support of marine advances.

Another scene shows the ANCILLARY aircraft flown from behind a rough mountain to spy on a village of mud-brick houses, sending information of suspected enemy positions back to the tablet of a commander. This scenario most resembles the use of drones in the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and presently parts of sub-Saharan Africa. 

The Department of Defense has already explored a range of delivery drones, from the hoverbike-derived Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle to the tilt-body APT-70 cargo drone. Neither of these drones were designed to perform the scouting tasks like the catapult-launched and skyhook-recovered ScanEagle. Adding a vertical-takeoff ability to drones like the ScanEagle has been such a long-standing interest that in 2015, the company that makes ScanEagle released a video showing the drone launched and recovered from a giant quadcopter mothership.

Across the conceptual DARPA scenarios, the drone is a self-contained tool, taking up at most a fraction of a landing pad or the back of a single truck. Flying from anywhere, it delivers aid and intelligence to the forces that need it, with similarly minimal input expected from human operators. In the DARPA video, the hypothetical drone appears to be a tail-sitter, meaning that it performs a pivot maneuver when taking off or landing to adjust its orientation. The Space Shuttle was also a tail-sitter when it took off, but not when it landed.

If such a drone already existed, DARPA would not need to fund the research to develop one. DARPA’s bet is that the components for such a drone can be found across commercial and military design. The agency suggests ANCILLARY will take advantage of “advancements in small propulsion systems, high capacity low weight batteries, fuel cells, materials, electronics,” and affordable 3D printing, all of which could allow new, more capable drone designs.

If ANCILLARY can deliver a delivery drone, soldiers stuck in rough terrain, distant islands, small ships, or wherever else normal supply infrastructure struggles could see aid arriving by sky, thanks to the autonomous robot couriers. Designing one drone capable of such delivery, while also functioning as a useful scout and communications relay, is a hard problem, one that will likely have to lean on the capabilities developed in both military and commercial sectors. 

Watch the DARPA video, below.

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The US Air Force is looking for a new way to win fights in the sky, and is turning to drones that can escort crewed fighters to do so. To explore the concept, the US Air Force is eyeing the idea of using a drone called the Ghost Bat, which was built for the Royal Australian Air Force. Speaking at an August event with the head of the Royal Australian Air Force, US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall suggested that the MG-28 Ghost Bat, or a variant, may fly into combat alongside future US fighters. The remark was first reported by Breaking Defense and hints at a future of international design for the loyal wingmate aircraft of tomorrow.

“I’m talking to my Australian counterparts in general about the [Next Generation Air Dominance] family of systems and how they might be able to participate,” Breaking Defense reports Kendall saying. In that context, Kendall continues, the Ghost Bat “could serve ‘as a risk reduction mechanism’ for NGAD’s drone capability.”

Next Generation Air Dominance is a long-in-development Air Force program and concept for designing aircraft that will fight in the skies of the 21st century. Historically, the Air Force has invested a great deal of effort into developing generations of fighter jets, with each wave flown alongside fighters from the previous and succeeding eras until deemed fully obsolete and phased out. 

Generations of jets

Consider the F-4 Phantom, a third-generation fighter that first entered military service in 1958, where it flew alongside the second-generation F-100 Super Sabre. The US retired the F-4 Phantom in 1996, after it flew alongside fourth-generation planes like the F-15 and F-16. Today, those fourth generation fighters fly alongside fifth-generation planes like the F-22 and F-35.

That pattern of development, which matched the pace and limits of aircraft development in the 1950s through 1990s, meant planes being flown for decades, despite becoming more and more obsolete as newer aircraft entered service at home and abroad.

“The Next Generation Air Dominance program is employing digital engineering to replace once-in-a-generation, mass-produced fighters with smaller batches of iteratively-upgraded platforms of multiple types,” declares an Air Force acquisition report from 2019-2020. 

Ghost Bat is a product of the Loyal Wingman program, which set out to design a dependable drone escort for fighters. This program is a way for the Air Force to iterate on plane design without committing to decades of service from the drones. 

Loyal wingmate

In the 2019-2020 report, the Air Force described Next Generation Air Dominance as a way to achieve air superiority in challenging conditions. At present, the air superiority mission is performed by crewed fighters like the F-22 and F-15, whose pilots risk their aircraft and their lives when fighting against enemy aircraft and anti-air weapons. Instead of building a single new fighter to replace F-15s and F-22s, the Air Force wants to borrow from the iterative design of the automotive industry, making drones with open architecture that can be more quickly developed, all in the name of improving the Air Force’s ability to survive, kill, and endure in the face of enemy aircraft and weapons. 

This survival will come as part of a mixed fleet of drones and crewed aircraft. Under the Loyal Wingman program, the Air Force has worked for years to develop a drone that can fly and fight alongside a crewed aircraft. Loyal wingmates, as envisioned, will fly alongside F-22s and F-35s, and any crewed aircraft that replaces the stealth jets may be designed with loyal wingmates in mind. 

What is the Ghost Bat?

The Ghost Bat is an uncrewed plane that is 38 feet long, with a flight range of 2,300 miles. Boeing, which makes it, says that the drone will incorporate sensor packages for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and expects it to perform scouting missions ahead of other aircraft, as well as being able to detect incoming threats. In addition, the plan is for the Ghost Bat to employ “artificial intelligence to fly independently or in support of crewed aircraft while maintaining safe distance between other aircraft.”

When the Royal Australian Air Force announced the Ghost Bat in March, they said it was the “first Australian-built aircraft in more than 50 years.” 

The name, selected from a pool of over 700 possibilities, is a tribute to the only carnivorous species of bat in Australia; they are hunters that use both eyes and echolocation to hunt prey. As the announcement from the RAAF explained, Ghost Bat was chosen as a name because ghost bats are the only Australian bat that can prey on both terrestrial and flying animals. In addition, the RAAF pointed to the drone’s possible use in electronic warfare, a mission already carried out in Australia by a unit with a ghost bat symbol. 

None of this offers a wealth of information on what the Ghost Bat actually does, but that’s sort of the point. What the Ghost Bat most needs to be able to do is be an uncrewed plane that can fly safely with, and receive orders from, crewed aircraft. To meet the goals of Next Generation Air Dominance, the Air Force wants planes that can be easily adapted to new missions and take on new tools, like sensors or electronic warfare weapons, or other tech not yet developed. 

Boeing built the Ghost Bat for the Loyal Wingman program, but it’s not the only loyal wingmate explored. The Kratos Valkyrie, built for the Air Force and tested as a loyal wingmate with the Skyborg autonomous pilot, has already seen its earliest models retired to be museum pieces.

While these are distinct aircraft, the flexibility of software and especially open-architecture autopilots means that an autonomous navigation system developed on one airframe could become the pilot on a different one. It is this exact modularity and flexibility the Air Force is looking at, as it envisions a future of robots flying alongside human pilots, with models numbered not in generations but years.

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On August 24, the Department of Defense announced it would be sending anti-drone weapons called VAMPIREs to Ukraine. The announcement of the VAMPIRE came in a larger, nearly $3 billion package of assistance from the United States to Ukraine as it fights against Russia’s invasion. The inclusion of VAMPIRE highlights the major role that drones are playing in the war, and the challenge of fighting against them without having specialized weapons.

The shape of the war is reflected in the other weapons included in the package. The US is sending up to 245,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition and up to 65,000 rounds of 120mm mortar ammunition, weapons that emphasize how much of the present conflict is an artillery fight. The 155mm artillery rounds, fired by US- and NATO-supplied howitzers, can duel with Russian artillery, while the mortar rounds let soldiers on foot attack enemy defenses from behind hills or otherwise out of sight. Paired with the artillery are two dozen counter-artillery radars, allowing better targeting in artillery duels.

The other half of the package is all drone- or counter-drone related. VAMPIRE is the headlining system, which combines a sensor with an anti-drone missile launcher that can mount on a range of vehicles, but it’s hardly the only counter-drone system in the package. Beyond an unspecified number of VAMPIRE systems, the August 24 announcement included six additional National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, a kind of anti-air missile system already in use in Ukraine, along with ammunition to match. The package includes laser-guided rocket systems, confirmed to be Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II rockets, which have been tested against drones. The drones included are Pumas and Scan Eagles, which can be launched without runways and give forces on the ground a better sense of where enemies and their artillery are.

What is the VAMPIRE counter-drone system?

Colin Kahl, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, described the VAMPIRE as a kinetic system that uses small missiles to shoot drones out of the sky. Many counter-drone systems use electromagnetic interference or jamming to disrupt the way a drone flies and communicates remotely with a human operator, but destroying the drone outright is a straightforward solution.

Made by L3Harris, VAMPIRE stands for Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment. “Vehicle-Agnostic” means it can go in multiple vehicles, and L3Harris’ site shows the system mounted in the bed of a crew-cab truck. Civilian vehicles are abundant and often modified for war. When weapons are mounted on such a vehicle, it becomes a “technical,” and the popularity of Toyota Hi-Lux trucks as technicals has led to the whole category of insurgency-by-truck being dubbed “Toyota Wars.”

Modular and palletized both refer to how the VAMPIRE can be transported and modified, and that the system includes its own power supply. ISR is “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” and in the case of VAMPIRE refers to the specific camera pod attached to the system. This camera pod, made by L3 Harris, includes a thermal sensor, optical camera, low-light optical camera, laser rangefinder, and a laser target marker to guide the laser-guided rockets. This sensor system can also include image processing, feature recognition, and video tracking, all of which are features that could enable it to see and track drones in flight.

What will the VAMPIRE hunt?

Drones are extensively used by both sides fighting in Ukraine. Before the invasion, Russia prepared with dedicated military drones to act as scouts and, especially, as spotters for artillery. Since the invasion, both forces have used drones extensively, with Ukraine using bomb and rocket-armed Bayraktar TB2 drones to strike Russian forces and record footage of the act.

As the war progressed, and initial stockpiles of machines and weapons depleted through use or destruction, both Ukrainian and Russian forces turned increasingly to other drone supplies. The United States, as well as NATO allies, continue to supply Ukraine with scout-and-spotter drones like the Pumas and Scan Eagles included in the latest package, as well as armed drone-missiles like the Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost. 

Russia has turned to Iran for extra drone supplies, and provincial governments in Russia have even redirected funds to purchase hobbyist, commercial drones so that their soldiers can go into battle with quadcopter scouts equal to the numbers used by Ukrainian soldiers. Hobbyist quadcopters are so in-demand militarily that Russia is formally training volunteer drone pilots. These drones are much cheaper than dedicated military models, with limited range and more vulnerable to jamming or other kinds of electronic warfare. 

A Mavic quadcopter can cost around $400, and the laser-guided rockets fired by VAMPIRE can cost $27,500 apiece, a disparity that suggests VAMPIRE will instead be hunting more specific military models like Orlan-10 and Orion drones, as well as other aircraft. Larger Iranian-made Mohajer-6 and Shahed drones, now in Russian service, are also likely VAMPIRE targets.

But in the context of the broader artillery duel in Ukraine, and with Ukrainian forces launching a counter-offensive to retake the Russian-held city of Kherson on the mouth of the Dnipro river, the ability to destroy artillery spotters in the form of drones in flight could save lives and preserve the advance. Brought into the open, VAMPIRE shows that modern counter-drone weapons are no longer kept in the shadows. 

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Contactless delivery systems boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic since they reduced the risk of transmission when delivering essential supplies like food and medications. Countries like Rwanda and Ghana used drones throughout the pandemic to limit physical contact while delivering medical commodities and COVID-19 supplies to people’s doorsteps.

In the US, companies are also adopting drone delivery services. Drones can help businesses expand their consumer reach, reduce delivery times, and increase revenues. For instance, major retail and pharmacy chains Walmart and Walgreens have partnered with DroneUp and Google’s Wing, respectively, for commercial drone delivery operations.

There’s no doubt that drone deliveries are beneficial for consumers and retailers alike, but new research shows that there’s another upside to them. As it turns out, using drones for small parcels may be more environmentally friendly than a conventional delivery truck or van.

Drones can be greener than vans and trucks for small deliveries

The use of drones for last-mile deliveries—which refers to the final step of the delivery process where the parcel arrives at the customer’s doorstep—may be an effective tool to reduce carbon emissions related to transportation. According to a recent study published in Cell Patterns, using quadcopter drones to deliver small, lightweight packages could reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by up to 94 and 84 percent, respectively, per package delivered.

To determine the energy consumption of a small drone, the authors developed an energy model based on 188 drone-delivery flights and found that it consumes approximately 0.08 megajoules of energy per kilometer. Afterward, they compared it to the energy consumption and associated carbon emissions of different delivery vehicles, which include diesel vans and trucks, electric vans and trucks, and electric cargo bicycles.

[Related: FedEx is charging up its electric vehicle fleet.]

Based on the study’s findings, only the electric cargo bicycles had a similar or lower carbon footprint per package than the small quadcopter drones. “Our study shows that drones could considerably reduce the energy consumption and GHG emissions of last-mile delivery, helping to mitigate the environmental footprint of the transportation sector,” says Thiago A. Rodrigues, study author and PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Using energy-efficient vehicles is an important first step for businesses that intend to reduce the carbon emissions of their deliveries, in addition to finding routes where more packages are delivered per mile, he adds.

Earlier this year, the US Postal Service announced that it placed an order for 50,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles to replace its fleet of aging delivery trucks. They intended to purchase at least 10,019 battery electric vehicles (BEV), but after facing several lawsuits for their plan to buy mostly gas-powered delivery vehicles, they increased the number of BEVs to 25,000.

Drones can produce even fewer carbon emissions if charged using renewable resources, says Sarah Lyon-Hill, associate director for research development at Virginia Tech Center for Economic and Community Engagement who was not involved in the study. Over time, the carbon emissions of electricity-powered vehicles—drones, vans, trucks, and cargo bicycles—are expected to improve as the electricity grid continues to get cleaner. And we’ll still need trucks and vans for our bigger deliveries, so greening our electricity use is still crucial.

Consumers benefit from drone deliveries

Our transportation infrastructure is currently strained due to the high demand for delivery services, which increased exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Lyon-Hill. However, even before COVID, plenty of households with needs for home delivery, such as those with elderly residents or lower-income households without car access, had limited transportation options. 

“Delivery drones have the potential to address this higher level of demand, decrease road congestion, speed up last-mile delivery services, and offer those services at lower costs to support lower-income households,” says Lyon-Hill. By reducing the number of vans on the road, drone deliveries can reduce traffic congestion, noise pollution, and harmful emissions. 

Drones may also be an effective way to deliver urgent medications and medical supplies, especially in rural areas. In a 2021 European Heart Journal study, drones with automated external defibrillators (AED) were deployed for 12 cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The AED was successfully delivered onsite in 92 percent of the cases and arrived before the ambulance in 64 percent of the cases.

[Related: Check out Wing’s new delivery drone prototypes.]

Despite the benefits of drones, there are still limitations that might prevent their use in certain applications. For instance, drones have limited capacity in terms of the mass and volume of the parcel they can transport, says Rodrigues. He adds that some areas may also be subjected to aerospace regulatory restrictions, which limit drone delivery routes. Areas near airports, schools, stadiums, and government buildings may have temporary and permanent no-fly zones that prohibit drone flights.

And companies are already on top of it. Amazon Prime Air, which plans to start drone deliveries this year, is currently working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and local officials in Lockeford, California to give consumers the option to have their parcels delivered via drones. 

“Other companies will likely follow this trend [of drone deliveries],” says Rodrigues, “if we develop the conditions to overcome some of the operational and regulatory challenges mentioned.”

Of course, just like with driverless cars and other forms of automation, there are always concerns with what will happen for delivery workers and their jobs. But drone deliveries, even when all of the policy kinks are straightened out, will still only be one part of future deliveries. Until then, making sustainable choices like ordering fewer times in larger quantities or accepting slower delivery times, can help bring down your online shopping footprint no matter how it is delivered.

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In mid-June, a drone called the Zephyr took off from Arizona. The solar-powered aircraft remained in the sky, flying through the rest of June, all of July, and about half of August. It flew, according to the Army, more than 34,500 miles. It even ventured over South America. 

But one night last week, something went wrong. While above the Yuma Proving Ground (YPG), which sits right near the border between Arizona and California, it “encountered events that led to its unexpected termination,” according to an Army release. The Army says that it is investigating what happened. 

All told, the aircraft, which is designed to soar at altitudes north of 60,000 feet, remained airborne for 64 days. Previously, the drone had completed other very long duration flights, such as one in 2018 that lasted almost 26 days, and two flights last year of about 18 days. As for the ultra-long journey that just suddenly ended, the Army says that it’s the longest flight on the books for an uncrewed aircraft, noting that it “beat all known unmanned aircraft endurance records.” However, as Simple Flying notes, a bizarre flight involving two pilots in a Cessna that took place between 1958 and 1959 lasted for nearly 65 days, so the record the Army is boasting about is for uncrewed aircraft. 

[Related: A solar-powered Army drone has been flying for 40 days straight]

So what happened to cause this flight to suddenly end? “Our team is working hard to gather and analyze important data following the unexpected termination of this flight,” Michael Monteleone, a cross-functional team director with Army Futures Command, said in a statement. The Army also notes that no one was hurt in the event.

Meanwhile, Simple Flying used the flight data it was able to glean and notes that its last moments had it at an altitude of some 45,000 or 50,000 feet, and that it experienced “a vertical descent rate which rapidly increased, topping out at a speed of 4,544 feet per minute.” As both that outlet and Task & Purpose speculate, the resulting unplanned impact with the ground was probably not gentle. 

The Zephyr gets its power from the sun, via onboard solar panels, and can store that energy in a battery system so that it has the juice it needs to keep flying when the sun isn’t shining. Made by Airbus, the most recent version has a wingspan of 82 feet. 

An aircraft like the Zephyr is known as a HAPS, which stands for high-altitude platform station (or pseudo-satellite). Besides Airbus, another company working in the space is AeroVironment. With the Zephyr, Airbus markets the craft as a type of connected watchtower high in the sky, like a satellite in the stratosphere, allowing it to conduct intelligence, surveillance, or reconnaissance missions for a military or carry out other tasks.

“When you have a platform that can stay in the air at very high altitudes that long, there are really two main missions that it’s very well suited for,” says JJ Gertler, a senior associate in the aerospace security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “One is reconnaissance—whether it’s looking down, or conceivably even looking up—the ability to stay on station a long time, and stare at a particular target or a particular area, is very useful.” 

“The other main mission would be [as a] communications relay—to be sort of a cell tower in the sky, connecting all kinds of different units,” he adds. “The more altitude you can get, the more area you can cover for that mission.”

Gertler notes that the Zephyr staying in the sky for 64 days “is something that was made possible by a number of technical advances—most significantly, lightweight photovoltaics.” 

But with a very long flight also comes new potential issues. “We’re not used to flying aero-structures for months at a time,” he adds. “We don’t know what kind of fatigue issue there may be when you do it for that long, without landing, or without maintenance. That’s life on the edge of technology.” 

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For decades, humans have used radio waves to remotely control drones. But this summer, British defense firm QinetiQ announced the successful control of a drone by laser. The communication and control method—between a flying robot and a human operator—suggests a new way to command drones in circumstances where traditional radio controls are susceptible to interference or interception. It is a promising technology, one that trades the existing known set of radio control limitations for a whole new set of laser-focused challenges.

The demonstration took place earlier this year at the Salisbury Plain Training Ground in southern England near Stonehenge. The drone was controlled, at least in part, by a system called “Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC),” in which information is turned into light, transmitted through the open sky, and picked up by a dedicated receiver.

“FSOC provide very high bandwidth, very low probability of detection communications, low logistical footprint and the potential to negate the considerable investment that adversaries may have made in denying the RF spectrum,” reads the July announcement from QinetiQ.

The demonstration took place in March of 2022, as part of a broader push by the United Kingdom’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory effort to make drone communications more resilient. Communications that depend on sending and receiving laser signals can struggle in low-visibility weather, like fog or dust, which obscures the sky. The promise of this approach, though, is for the possibility of clear, high-bandwidth transmission of vast quantities of data rapidly with light, and done openly wherever the sender and receiver may be. This has already been realized in networks of fiber-optic cables, which are closed space optical communications, and require infrastructure investment to establish and connect. 

Light years

Making this kind of communication work has been the subject of military research for decades. In 2004, the Air Force Research Laboratory and DARPA collaborated on the Optical and Radio Frequency Combined Link Experiment (ORCLE). The program aimed to combine the high data capacity of light communications with the signal fidelity of radio. ORCLE set out to integrate both methods into a network of communication nodes, with an understanding that radio would allow for persistent communication in difficult weather.

In 2008, DARPA awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman for the Optical RF Communications Adjunct (ORCA) project, aimed at providing “an all-weather, high connectivity, jam resistant, high bandwidth network,” according to Northrop Grumman’s release.

Because of the limits of optical communication alone, much of the research on free-space optical communication pairs it with radio communication for greater resiliency.

“Although FSOC systems can be inoperable through clouds or thick fog, employing them in a hybrid RF/optical link configuration can yield a system that can operate under most weather conditions and provide high-bandwidth, secure, jam-resistant communications under most conditions,” argued the authors of a 2011 paper on free-space optical networks, including members of DARPA. 

More recently, DARPA has focused its research on optical communications in space between satellites, which is free from the atmospheric obstacles impeding light-based communication on earth. 

Free space, narrow aperture

Radio signals are sent over known frequencies, understood and monitored for ever a century. The nature of radio transmission means the waves can be observed beyond where they are received, as the signals travel through open air and sometimes refract or diffuse across terrain and atmospheric phenomena. That trait is useful for transmitting information over distance, but is less useful for keeping that information secret. The promise of optical communication, specifically based on lasers, is that it will instead concentrate all its transmitted information in a narrow beam of light.

“Free Space Optical Communications is almost impossible to intercept or detect, as the laser beam travels directly from one platform to another over a very narrow path,” QinetiQ describes on its website. “Interception would require an adversary to be physically present in the path of the beam – something that is extremely difficult to achieve.”

If interception is difficult, maintaining a signal is likely not easy. While a drone would have the advantage of knowing where the directed beam is coming from, and automatically orienting its receiver to that point, it could become vulnerable to laser dazzlers, designed to disable the sensors on a flying robot.

The greatest promise of the technology, used at the shorter ranges of small drones, is that it would allow soldiers a way to command a scout without being detected along radio frequencies. QinetiQ’s announcement notes that the demonstration “included Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC) as a bi-directional link in its mission communication system.” 

Other bi-diretional communication links may exist in the system tested by QinetiQ, serving as fail-safes or backups. A drone designed to only receive laser signals could be challenging to use. A drone that includes a laser signal alongside traditional methods would, in a fail-case, operate normally, while having the potential for extra utility.

For now, this technology appears focused on the command, control, and data transfer functions of a scouting drone. The challenge becomes more complex should it apply to a drone designed to carry weapons. But with just a scout, the faster data transfers of optical communication would let useful video arrive rapidly, or allow greater resolution cameras without bandwidth concerns. All with the promise, at least, that the drone would be useful even in the face of radio jammers and counter-drone technologies.

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In February, for the first time, a Black Hawk helicopter flew itself around with no humans on board. The self-flying military helo project involved both DARPA and Sikorsky, which makes the UH-60 helicopters. 

Meanwhile, in some places, companies like Zipline and Wing are delivering goods by drone. Other companies are working on electric air taxis to transport people or cargo, and of course normal air traffic—commercial flights out of big airports, general aviation airplanes zipping out of others—is flying around, too. Factor in helicopters, hot air balloons, and more, and there can be a lot going on up there.  

With all this busyness in the skies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon are working on an artificial intelligence pilot system that can carry out tasks like predicting what another aircraft might do, or keep an eye out for nearby planes using cameras on an aircraft. The idea is that an AI like this could help fly drones, assist a human pilot, or even someday fly a plane on its own. 

Right now, in a flight simulator, the AI is able to figure out what another aircraft is doing, or might do, and then figure out how to safely land the plane accordingly. Think of the way a driver behind the wheel of a car notices another vehicle approaching an intersection, and begins preemptively planning what to do if the other car were to run a stop sign, for example. 

In this case, the AI is looking out for another plane, not a car, of course. “It basically looks at their behavior for 10 seconds,” says Jay Patrikar, a doctoral student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “It tries to judge: ‘They are here. What are they potentially likely to do?’” 

In that sense, it’s like an AI that can play chess, says Patrikar, thinking about what its move would be in advance if its opponent were to take a certain action.

[Related: The Air Force plans to test an AI copilot on its cargo planes]

Artificial intelligence systems need data to learn from. In this case, the team is gathering data from two real-world airports, both of them in Pennsylvania. One has an air traffic control tower, and the other does not. Patrikar says that at those airports the data they hoover up includes visual information from cameras located on a hanger or near the taxiway, spoken communication from the radios, weather data, and more. “We record the entirety of it,” he says. The idea is for the AI to be able to learn cause and effect by paying attention to all this information. 

“It knows the causality of things,” he adds. That means that the AI could learn, for example, that “it was because of the weather that they [a pilot] decided to do this particular thing.” The training the AI received in these scenarios has helped it learn how to navigate a landing in simulation, Patrikar says. 

Plus, an AI bringing an aircraft in for a landing at a small, uncontrolled airport must both follow FAA rules as well as other norms when interacting with other planes, Patrikar points out. “One of the ways humans trust each other is with our shared understanding of rules—our social norms,” he says. People on a busy sidewalk might decide how to pass each other by moving to the right, for example, and rules like that apply in aviation that the AI pilot must follow. 

[Related: This company is retrofitting airplanes to fly on missions with no pilots]

Related work in the real world, not in simulation, has the team putting cameras on aircraft like a Cessna 172 or a hexacopter drone. Those cameras and the AI are able to spot other aircraft in the area, identify them, and figure out how far away they are with a greater than 90-percent accuracy rate at a distance of 700 meters (about 2,300 feet). This kind of tech could help a human pilot in a small plane visually spot other traffic in the area. “I would like to have that system on my plane,” says Patrikar, who has a private pilot license. After all, artificial intelligence doesn’t blink.

To be sure, the Carnegie Mellon researchers are not the only people exploring the new frontier of artificial intelligence that can fly, or help fly, aircraft. The Zipline drone company has been working on a way to use microphones on its drones to listen for other aircraft in the area and then take evasive action to avoid any potential collisions. And notably, a company called Merlin Labs has also developed a digital pilot that could take the place of a human copilot. As one example, it’s working with the Air Force on equipping C-130J cargo planes with their system, so instead of a human crew of two pilots, the aircraft could be flown by a single human paired with an artificial copilot. 

The post Move over, autopilot: This AI can avoid other planes appeared first on Popular Science.

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The rising oceans of the 2040s will be battlefields for both crewed ships and robotic ones. In a document called Force Design 2045, the US Navy’s strategy guiding the next decades of ship and vehicle development, anticipating what war will be like in the middle of the century is crucial to ensuring peace or, failing that, seizing victory. In announcing the strategy, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday wrote that “the world is entering a new age of warfare, one in which the integration of technology, concepts, partners, and systems—more than fleet size alone—will determine victory in conflict.”

The strategy is couched, first and foremost, in continued open, free, and lawful trade across the seas, including the familiar commerce of goods and materials, but also incorporating the undersea cables that connect the internet as vital infrastructure. To ensure this peace, the plan says the Navy must maintain a nuclear deterrent (presently missile-carrying submarines), control the sea to deter invasion (and land Marines as needed), and to defeat enemies in ocean battles should it come to that.

To meet this need, the Navy plans to maintain its crewed fleet of aircraft carriers, nuclear-armed ballistic submarines, nuclear-powered attack submarines, as well as crewed destroyers and frigates. The Navy also plans to introduce over a hundred robotic ships. Here’s how it’s all going to shake out.

How many ships?

Variations of this strategy have existed since the dawn of nuclear-armed submarines. Beyond submarines, the question for the Navy has been how it meets those objectives, and what composition of ships it needs to get there. In the latest strategy, the Navy offers clear numbers.

“In the 2040s and beyond,” reads the strategy, “we envision this hybrid fleet to require more than 350 manned ships, about 150 large unmanned surface and subsurface platforms, and approximately 3,000 aircraft.”

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

The exact number of ships needed by the Navy has been the subject of presidential campaigns, with then-candidate Trump proposing a 350-ship Navy when running in 2016. In October 2020, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called for a Navy with more than 500 ships. At present, the US Navy has 298 ships, with previous plans floated this year suggesting the Navy aim for a goal between 316 and 367 ships.

With the new strategy, the Navy sets an ambitious goal for 52 more crewed vessels than at present, while also showcasing that to get the reach and numbers promised by a 500-ship fleet, the Navy will have to lean heavily on uncrewed ships, like those tested this month at the major RIMPAC naval exercises.

So what will the drone ships do?

The most immediate use for uncrewed ships and robotic submarines will be as scouts. The ocean is vast, and scanning the seas in real time allows the Navy to see some of it and plan accordingly.

“The integration of autonomous USVs with manned combatants will give fleet commanders much-needed enhancements to maritime domain awareness, thereby increasing decision speed and lethality in surface warfare,” Captain Scot Searles, Navy program manager for unmanned maritime systems, said in a release describing the use of uncrewed ships at RIMPAC.

Sensors on robotic ships represent an ideal initial use case, because that approach offers an immediate benefit without requiring constant human supervision or careful monitoring. These roles are also good testing opportunities for autonomous navigation and remote direction, both features that will be crucial should oceans become battlefields.

[Related: A Navy ship got a giant liquid-metal 3D printer earlier this month]

“Unmanned surface and subsurface platforms to increase the fleet’s capacity for distribution; expand our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance advantage; add depth to our missile magazines; supplement logistics; and enhance fleet survivability,” reads the strategy. “This transition will rebalance the fleet away from exquisite, manpower-intensive platforms toward smaller, less-expensive, yet lethal ones.”

Scouting will likely be the first mission for these ships, but future missions will include resupply and transport, allowing extra ammunition and other vital cargo to be carried on ships without sailors. To get to “lethal,” these uncrewed ships will need to have weapons, as the Navy has already demonstrated. 

Under remote operation, a missile battery on an uncrewed ship could still be under human control, with the decision to fire handled by humans who are located on a different vessel. As with any autonomous sensor-and-weapon system, the possibility exists that targeting and firing could be made autonomous in the future, though nothing in the strategy indicates that as an approach.

Armed uncrewed ships, like the planned Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles, will carry vertical launch system missile tubes, expanding the number of missiles that can be brought to battle. Uncrewed armed ships can’t do everything a crewed missile-destroyer can, like relief missions or dissuading attacks of opportunity. In a ship-to-ship naval battle, the available number of missiles ready to launch may be more important for victory than the number of ships in a flotilla.

In addition to the uncrewed ships, the strategy says the Navy will “augment the force with an evolving complement of thousands of small, rapidly adaptable, and attritable unmanned platforms.” These many small and expendable drones in land, surface, and underwater will include models that scout ahead of ships, ones that wait in the ocean a long time, and ones that can hurt enemy vessels, through electronic warfare or explosive power, all with the goal of enhancing the fighting ability of the crewed fleet.

Putting it all together

As the Navy plots a strategy for a course between now and the 2040s, it is focused primarily on a singular potential threat: the growing naval capabilities of China. Where once Russian and before that Soviet navies were the focus of US fears, China has overtaken the country in the imagination and warplanning of the Pentagon. Fighting a future war against China, should it occur without a world-ending nuclear exchange, means adapting to a very different reality, a kind of naval warfare that has not yet been attempted.

In the decades since the Pacific campaigns of WWII, missile technology has improved tremendously, not to mention the development of modern hypersonic weapons. Missiles shift the calculus for fleets, as a successful missile hit can sink a massive and expensive ship for a fraction of what it cost to produce the vessel. Replacing a ship takes years even in ideal conditions, and even if a ship is damaged, it can still be out of commission for months.

While the Navy’s plan still relies on aircraft carriers, submarines with nuclear missiles and those without, and big crewed escort ships, adding in uncrewed vessels means the burden of resupply can gradually be removed from crewed ships, preserving sailors for the vessels on which they’re most needed. The ability to scale up ship operations, without training new human crews, means the Navy could operate more and smaller resupply vessels, minimizing the harm from each loss. 

While the Navy sets out a strategy for 2045, the immediate impact will be seen in spending, on what ships and programs the Pentagon decides to build out for its fleet now. If the future of war is human-crewed fighting ships with uncrewed resupply and robotic scouts, that future will start to take shape in shipyards.

The post The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels appeared first on Popular Science.

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Very early in the morning on June 15, a lightweight drone with a 82-foot wingspan took off from the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, assisted by a handful of people who had to hand-launch it from the runway. It’s been 40 days since then, and the drone is still flying, continuously breaking its own record with each minute that goes by until it lands at some point. 

On Friday, Breaking Defense noted that the light, solar-powered aircraft had been up there for 37 days, a mission that had it “demolishing its previous 26-day record.” An Army spokesperson confirmed to PopSci that the drone is still airborne as of today, meaning it’s been flying for 40 days and change. 

The Airbus-made drone is solar-powered, designed to fly in the stratosphere and operate off just a tiny bit of electricity. In fact, an October 2021 Army release noted that its power needs are the same as “a single commercial light bulb.” 

The Zephyr has flown for long periods of time previously. It flew for two weeks in 2010, and then it carried out its then-record-breaking 26-day flight (to be precise, that flight time is actually listed as 25 days, 23 hours, and 57 minutes) in 2018. That year, it was also noted as a Best of What’s New winner from PopSci.

Since that year, the Zephyr has been upgraded internally, the Army said in 2021. “It has some design upgrades to make it a more capable system,” Simon Taylor, the head of Zephyr program, said in a release. “The aircraft physically isn’t very different, it’s what sits inside the aircraft and the clever software inside it. We’re going for a much more ambitious flying campaign than we’ve ever attempted to date.” In 2021, it carried out two flights, according to an Army spokesperson. Each of those was about 18 days long. 

[Related: An electric aircraft just completed a journey of 1,403 miles]

The Zephyr’s first flight of 2022 is the one that’s airborne now, and it took off mid-June. It is a mission that has so far “demonstrated Zephyr’s energy storage capacity, battery longevity, solar panel efficiency and station-keeping abilities that will further the Army’s goal to implement ultra-long endurance stratospheric UAS capabilities,” the Army said on July 21. This flight is also the first time that this drone has flown into international airspace or over water. 

Drones like the Zephyr, which can soar for long periods of time in the stratosphere at altitudes higher than 60,000 feet, have applications in a field known as ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. “Ultra-long endurance unmanned platforms have the potential to provide significant military capabilities and enhanced confidence as part of the Army’s diversified multi-layered architecture,” Michael Monteleone, who directs a group in the Army called the APNT/Space CFT, said.

This Zephyr may be flying right now, but the Army says a second one is set to take off “in the coming weeks.” Its destination? It is set to “travel over the Pacific Ocean.” 

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When the new B-21—the Air Force’s next-gen stealth bomber—goes to war, it will do so without a drone escort. The news, broken by Breaking Defense on July 16, is a sharp reversal from earlier plans that had included developing a drone fighter that could travel alongside the bomber and protect it. 

The story of the planned and then abandoned drone escort is a smaller part of the broader story about the B-21, the first new bomber developed by the United States in 30 years, and the first one developed entirely after the Cold War.

News of the cancellation of the drone escort came at the Royal International Air Tattoo, a massive military air show held in England every July.

“The idea of a similar range collaborative combat aircraft is not turning out to be cost effective, so it looks like we’re not going to go that direction,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Breaking Defense in an interview at the event. Kendall had previously announced the possible drone escort in December 2021, with the intention of the drone fighters being a budget item for 2023.

Abandoning the concept of a fighter escort, even an uncrewed one, for the new bomber is part of the long history of failed attempts to protect bombers en route. Three separate but related programs are key to understanding the impact of this cancellation: the B-21 itself, escort fighters, and the Loyal Wingman drone fighter program.

The B-21

The B-21 Raider began its history as the Long Range Strike Bomber. Rebranded the B-21, and with its “Raider” name stemming from the Army Air Force’s 1942 raid on Tokyo, the aircraft will be the fourth bomber in service with the Air Force. These include the ancient B-52 bombers, which have fought in every US war since Vietnam, the supersonic B-1 bombers, which entered service in 1986, and the stealth B-2 bombers, which first saw combat in the Kosovo War in 1999. The B-21 will be closest in conceit to the B-2.

Those bombers all represent a range of abilities and design eras. While all were built to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons, today only the B-2 and B-52 do so. Nuclear capability was engineered out of B-1 bombers in upgrades done as part of arms control limits on total nuclear-capable bombers.

Early in the development of the Long Range Strike Bomber, the Air Force explored the possibility that the bomber could fly uncrewed, though that notion was roundly rejected for nuclear missions, and probably for other bombing runs, too.

As designed, the B-21 will be a stealth long-range bomber capable of carrying both conventional bombs and nuclear weapons. Long-range in this sense is intercontinental: the B-1 can fly almost 6,000 miles with a useful payload, while the B-2 can reach nearly 7,000 miles, and the B-52 can fly close to 9,000 miles. (Air refueling helps.) To replace existing bombers and accommodate planned future need, the Air Force is requesting that a minimum of 100 B-21s be built, with construction on the first six B-21s underway as of February 2022. (It has not yet flown.)

For countries that want to protect against bombers, the weapons they have historically turned to are anti-air missiles and fighter aircraft. Stealth features, which the B-2 was built around and the B-21 will incorporate as well, make it harder for sensors like radar to detect and track a plane, limiting the danger from anti-air missiles. 

Escort fighters

Fighter jets that can intercept and attack bombers are a hard threat to mitigate. In World War II, bombers, especially the “Fortress” line of which the B-52 is still a part, adopted on-board guns to shoot fighters. (The B-52’s tail guns saw use in Vietnam, but the guns were removed in October 1991, while the gun’s rear-facing radar systems were retained.) That defense strategy struggles against the threat of long-range anti-air missiles and especially at the high speeds of jet combat, which is where the possibility of an escort fighter is appealing. 

An escort fighter is one designed to fly alongside bombers and, in the event of interception, protect the bombers from the hostile fighters. A variant of escort is the “parasite” fighter, which rides attached to or inside a bigger plane, waiting to be released when needed. While the parasite fighters save on fuel, carrying one reduces a bomber’s effective payload and also requires the difficult task of landing a fighter back on a plane after the bombing is done. DARPA is exploring cargo planes that can launch drones, for a similar effect, but without having to worry about a pilot on board or their safety after the mission.

If the escort is to fly alongside the bomber, then, it needs to have the same range as the bomber, while still being in a small enough airframe to be useful and maneuverable as a fighter when it falls under attack. Removing the pilot from a cockpit saves some room in a fighter escort, but the plane would still need to carry enough fuel for an intercontinental journey, enough sensors and weapons to fight, and if the drone is designed for repeat use, enough fuel to carry it back afterwards. That is a tall ask, especially when crewed fighters like the F-16 Fighting Falcon have a one-way travel range of just over 2,000 miles, and a shorter combat effective range.

Mid-air refueling can extend the range of both bombers and fighters, but it would be another hurdle for a long-distance drone escort fighter. Before adding “autonomous mid-air refueling” to the list of tasks for a drone, it is likely the Air Force will want to try a shorter-range drone fighter first.

The Loyal Wingman

The Air Force is already working on a drone fighter of sorts, just not one built for the great distances of bomber flights. The Kratos Valkyrie, part of the Air Force’s “loyal wingman” program, is a drone designed as a relatively inexpensive complement to fighter squadrons.  And Skyborg, another Air Force program to create an autonomous pilot for aircraft, is an effort to enable uncrewed planes to fly alongside crewed craft.

These drones are designed to fly alongside fighters crewed by pilots, with the autonomous system of the drones possibly carrying out tasks like flying ahead. By keeping extra sensors and possibly even weapons in the loyal wingmates, pilots of expensive fighters like the F-35 could send drones in for riskier missions, like scouting and attacking hostile surface-to-air missile sites. 

Even as the prospect of a drone fighter escort for bombers is unlikely, the loyal wingman program remains a priority for the Air Force. The Air Force is still developing drones that can fly and fight alongside crewed planes, even if they are not yet bomber escorts. For now, the B-21 will have to rely on stealth and speed to keep it safe. 

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On July 11, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, told reporters that the government of Iran was prepared to send several hundred drones, including armed drones, to Russia. And in late June, the impoverished Buryatia region of Russia reportedly raised 200 million rubles of its own funding to buy equipment for soldiers, including quadcopters. Taken together, these stories offer a portrait of how Russia is trying to sustain its invasion of Ukraine, with both foreign and hobbyist drones being pressed into military service.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, it did so with an army that had some experience with modern warfare, but nothing on the scale of the massive three-pronged tank-led assault it undertook. In the four and a half months since, the Russian military consolidated its hold around southern Ukraine, withdrew its failed attempt to capture the capital of Kyiv, and concentrated a major advance on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. 

With an increasingly static front line, Russia is relying on its numerically superior artillery to destroy Ukrainian forces. Ukraine, in turn, has received new long-range artillery from the United States and NATO countries, which it is using to destroy Russian ammunition depots near the front. To make every artillery shot count, both sides are relying on drones to find targets, and also to reveal if the targets were destroyed.

Russia’s push for new and more drones comes in the context of these artillery duels.

No longer ‘blind kittens’

Drones give forces an eye in the sky. “These commercial drones are used to conduct surveillance, provide timely intel on the Ukrainian forces, as well as to direct artillery/MLRS/mortar strikes,” said Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “Russian efforts now also involve using these commercial quadcopters to drop munitions, something that Ukrainians have excelled in during the conflict.” Videos of drones dropping bombs in Ukraine date back to the earleir Donbass war, and have proliferated ever since the invasion.

While there are dedicated drone models built for and deployed by the military, Russian units, from infantry formations to tank crews to artillery teams, have supplemented military drones with commercial and hobbyist models, the kind that can be found in stores. 

These hobbyist drones, like those made by China’s drone giant DJI, are not part of standard issue kit. In April, DJI specifically halted sales of its drones to Russia and Ukraine.

Regardless, soldiers are finding ways to get the drones on their own, or in the case of the regional government of Buryatia, using its own meager governmental funds to supply soldiers.

[Related: Calling all ‘dronations’: a new way to help Ukraine]

Buryatia “is one of the poorest regions in the country, and it’s no surprise that many of its soldiers are fighting in Ukraine, many for the monetary reward promised by the Ministry of Defense,” says Bendett. Siberian news service Tayga published an account from the government of Buryatia, where soldiers returning from the front described fighting without quadcopters as being like “blind kittens.” These quadcopters give soldiers the ability to see 5 km (3.1 miles) from where they are, whereas going into battle against enemies that do have quadcopters risks being spotted miles away.

Additional funds being raised for deployed soldiers is not uncommon in war. During and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, stories of national guard soldiers buying their own body armor proliferated, as did reports of bake sales to equip soldiers already serving in the best funded military on Earth. In Russia, the invasion of Ukraine is still described by the government and press as a ‘special operation,’ but published appeals for more direct aid to soldiers show at least some acknowledgement that the military is struggling.

“What’s unusual so far is the language critical of Russian military capability gaps, like soldiers talking openly that they lack [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] equipment at the tactical edge,” says Bendett.

What to know about the Iranian drones

“It’s unclear whether Iran has delivered any of these [drones] to Russia already,” Sullivan told press on July 11. “But this is just one example of how Russia is looking to countries like Iran for capabilities that are also being used, I might add, or have been used before we got the ceasefire in place in Yemen, to attack Saudi Arabia.”

Sullivan was specifically referring to the kind of drone strikes launched by Houthi forces in Yemen, as part of the ongoing war in that country between various factions, including Saudi Arabia. These attacks include loitering munitions fired at oil refineries in Saudi Arabia, a kind of long-range attack that was previously difficult for armed factions without air forces to conduct. 

Using drones for long-range strike would augment a persistent limitation of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, which is that its helicopters, fighters, and bombers are vulnerable to anti-air missiles. As noted by The War Zone, “Iranian armed drones would be much cheaper than using cruise or ballistic missiles.”

It is possible that the Iranian drones mentioned by the White House are instead the more traditional scouting type, in which case they would augment existing scout and spotter drones flown by Russian forces. But if Russia is turning to Iran for drone-like missiles, it suggests that Russia sees a path to victory in the war through hitting Ukrainian targets far from the front line.

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In April, a company called Wing launched a drone delivery service in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas. Wing is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and uses a small flying machine called the Hummingbird to deliver goods from places like Walgreens, and even ice cream from Blue Bell Creameries. 

The Hummingbird drone is just over 4 feet long, with a wingspan of about 5 feet, and many little propellers driven by electric motors. A dozen of those props exist to help the small aircraft hover or move through the air vertically, but four propellers on the wings also help it cruise horizontally to get where it needs to go. (Another version of the Hummingbird has just two propellers for cruise and a shorter wingspan: 3.3 feet.) The craft weighs just about 12 pounds, can carry a package that weighs 2.6 pounds, and travels at 65 miles per hour. 

The way it delivers that package to a customer is charming: It lowers it down on a tether, with the contents secured in a small box. 

The company now says that it’s working on what it calls an “Aircraft Library,” sketching out new drone designs with different sizes that could carry packages of various weights. Here’s what they’ve got cooking. 

The small one

One prototype is smaller than the Hummingbird. It weighs about 4 pounds, and would carry a package with a heft of just about two-thirds of a pound. So, this drone size is ideal for transporting stuff from a pharmacy, like a bottle of Advil. 

Adam Woodworth, who became CEO of Wing in February, holds up the small prototype (resembling the upper drone in the image above) to demonstrate it in a video interview with PopSci. A propeller at its front is what would pull it through the sky, like you would see on any small airplane. “We have two main lift rotors here,” he says, gesturing towards two gray rotors beneath the craft’s little wing. These do the majority of the lifting work. 

[Related: These drones can avoid midair collisions by listening for other aircraft]

At the end of each wing are two smaller rotors, each pair positioned on a little boom. They “work almost like the thrusters on a spacecraft,” Woodworth adds. If the two main lift rotors are helping the machine hover or move up and down vertically, the smaller ones at the wingtips can help with smaller adjustments. 

While the main drone in use today delivers packages by lowering them on a line, the small prototype would be carrying such light stuff that it doesn’t need a gentle lowering mechanism. “The package is so light, you’d probably hover over the backyard and drop it on the ground,” he says. That’s fine for a bottle of Advil, but you might not want to order a single raw egg if you could find a purveyor to sell you one.

The big one

The larger drone concept has a pleasantly bulbous body, and sports two dozen hover motors on four booms that run perpendicular to its wings. Like with the latest version of the Hummingbird, it has four propellers to give it the horizontal thrust it needs to cruise through the sky. This prototype weighs about 20 pounds and could carry a package weighing around 6.6 pounds. 

Woodworth says that like the Hummingbird, the larger prototype would employ the same tether delivery system, although they’re still tinkering with it. “A lot of the work on the big one was figuring out how to get that same system to work,” he says. 

In review: The small prototype is good for little pharmacy stuff, and the existing Hummingbird is a fit for transporting “prepared food, and relatively small consumer goods,” Woodworth says. But for the big one, “you’d be focusing more on the sort of things that you’d order online, and expect to get the next day, but you’d get them in a few minutes [via drone].” Examples: a pair of sneakers, or a Wi-Fi router. 

Wing is certainly not the only company working in this space: Zipline delivers goods in Arkansas, as well as in countries such as Rwanda and Ghana. It recently developed an innovative way for its aircraft to employ microphones to listen for other planes that could present a collision hazard. Moving way up in size, Elroy Air makes a drone called the Chaparral, which weighs 1,900 pounds. Elroy is teaming up with FedEx for package transport. And companies like Beta Technologies, which is working with UPS, are developing larger electric aircraft that can carry humans or cargo. Finally, Amazon also just announced it will start offering drone deliveries “later this year” in a Texas city called College Station, although that company has had a rough go with their previous drone endeavors. 

Watch more about Wing’s drone “library” approach, below:

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Smartphones have changed the way most people capture photos and videos. They can do just about everything a traditional camera can, from capturing crisp portraits to epic landscapes. Smartphones cannot, however, fly. So, until Samsung introduces a new Galaxy phone with a tiny jet pack on the back, drones represent the best way to capture images from the air. Here on Prime Day 2022, there are several drone deals worth checking out, including a very solid package deal on one of DJI’s most accessible crafts.

DJI Mini 2 Fly More Combo $479 (Was $599)

Stan Horaczek

SEE IT

250 grams represents a magical number when it comes to flying drones, at least hear in the United States. Any flying machine weighing 250 grams or more needs to be registered with the FAA before it can take to the skies. Conveniently, the DJI Mini 2 checks in at just 249 grams, which means you can go right from the Amazon box to the air.

Despite its extremely petit size and weight, the Mini 2 is a real drone. It gets up to 31 minutes of flight time on a single battery and this kit comes with three cells. The craft can transmit 720p video back to a mobile device from up to 6.6 miles in real-time. Its camera captures 4K footage at 30 fps, but you can crank up the framerate if you don’t mind dropping the resolution.

The package also includes a battery charger, a full-featured remote, extra props (which you’re going to need if you’re just learning to fly), and a carrying case to keep all of it together. This is a fantastic package for someone just looking to get into drone flying or even a great backup drone for an experienced flyer. It’s small enough that you can safely fly it indoors once you get used to the controls. Just please be considerate of your pets.

More drone and drone accessory deals

While DJI’s Mini 2 deal is by far the best drone deal we’ve seen, it’s not the only game in town. Here are some more deals that will appeal to aspiring aerialists:

• Lexar 256GB Micro SD Card $28.69 (Was $40.99)
• Potensic P5 Drones with Camera 4K $143.99 (Was $199.99)
• UranHub Drone with Camera 2K UHD $99.99 (Was $129.99)
• Zuhafa T5 RC Quadcopter $95.99 (Was $139.99)
• Zuhafa T4 Foldable Drone with 1080P HD Camera for Kids and Adults $49.99 (Was $65.99)

More Amazon Prime deals

• The best AirPods deal for Prime Day
• Amazon Kindle Prime Day deals
• The best gaming deals for Prime Day
• Prime Day TV deals
• Eero router deals for Prime Day
• Save on Garmin Watches for Prime Day
• 2022 Coleman camping Prime Day deals
• Save 30 percent on a huge LG OLED TV for Prime Day
• Bose headphones Prime Day sales
• The best audio deals for Prime Day

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When Army cadets at West Point train in the surrounding mountain valleys and field courses, they are learning to fight war in what the military terms a “passively denied environment.” The term means that the natural landscape interferes with radio signals, making it hard for the soldiers-in-training to communicate as they might in an open field.

While the military practices for this, and has decades of experience fighting wars in urban and mountainous terrain, another possibility is to use new technologies to create a signal relay between soldiers in the terrain and commanders farther away. To get there, the Army is developing an “aerial tier network,” or a system of flying machines that can serve as a signal relay.

An “[Aerial Tier Network] allows us to send data up to an asset in the aerial tier and then back down, permitting the signal to hop over obstructions to effectively obtain more nodes and extend the area of communication,” said Scott Newman, a project manager with the Army’s Program Executive Office Command Control Communications-Tactical.

In other words, having an aircraft available to relay signals means soldiers fighting in one valley can share information with soldiers on the other side of the ridge, without worrying that the signal is lost. As battlefields sprawl, encompassing villages, city neighborhoods, or great swaths of rough terrain, staying in touch with friendly forces over distance becomes more important. 

[Related: The UK’s wee military recon drones will double as cartographers]

Losing communication can mean getting isolated, ambushed, or simply not advancing quickly enough. Maintaining a communication link can instead let soldiers outmaneuver their enemies, spot weaknesses, share information about attacks, and maintain cohesion while fighting as part of a larger force.

In the 2021 Project Convergence technology demonstration, the Army used drones to facilitate this over-the-hill communication, though the aerial tier network can work with more than just drones. Provided the aircraft can receive and relay signals, the job could be performed by circling planes, helicopters operating in the area, or even new aircraft in the works as part of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift program.

In May, reports C4ISRNET, Greg Napoli of the Army Futures Command Network Cross-Functional Team told an industry meeting that Aerial Tier could mean everything from armed planes to aerostats, which are basically tethered balloons with communications relays. Other options include tall, portable relay antennas and drones.

At present, this kind of up-and-over-the-hill communication is done through satellites, but satellites have limits. While many communications networks aim for reliable continuous global coverage, the signals can be blocked by jammers, and the satellites could be vulnerable in a war if a country uses anti-satellite missiles or other space weaponry to destroy them.

An aerial network, instead, can be brought to where the soldiers are, and offers a communication link immediately overhead, with one that can be taken down and transported elsewhere as the fighting shifts. All of this is designed to enhance the Army’s ability to stay in touch and coordinate while spaced apart from friendly forces. This kind of dispersed communication is called NLOS, for “Not Line of Sight.” 

[Related: A next-gen tank will be revealed in October. Here’s what we know about it so far.]

Future developments to improve this kind of networked communication will influence how the Army develops its Relay for Air NLOS Ground Environments (RANGE). Extending the distance over which a relay can work, as the clunky acronym RANGE spells out, allows soldiers to operate farther from one another while still maintaining useful contact.

The way an Army talks to its component parts shapes how it can fight. Modern warfare is sensor-rich, with cameras on drones and tanks, radar from aircraft, thermal imaging in soldier-worn goggles, and more, all contributing to a vast collection of information in the field. Turning that information from observation to action means analyzing it and sharing it, letting artillery a few miles back pinpoint a target spotted by a drone flown by scouts. The communications network between all these parts makes the whole operation sing, facilitating devastating assaults and clean retreats.

As the Army develops new aircraft to support soldiers in the field, Aerial Tier Networks connect those aircraft to the fighting on the ground, making these relays crucial to how the Army communicates. Better communication between nearby forces means that when fighting happens, reinforcements can be in place, allies can know where the danger is, and the odds can be stacked in favor of the Army. Firefights are chaotic moments, full of sound and danger as soldiers exchange fire and try to survive long enough to win.

With the Aerial Tier Network, the Army intends to make communication in difficult terrain as easy as it is in open plains.

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When a drone from a company called Zipline is zipping through the air at some 70 mph, the ideal scenario is that no other low-flying, but faster, aircraft smashes into it. Zipline drones deliver health-focused supplies (like blood) via parachute in countries such as Rwanda and Ghana. They also make commercial deliveries from a Walmart in Arkansas. In Rwanda, they’ve even been delivering semen from bulls (and pigs), for the purposes of insemination with a focus on, in the case of the bull semen, genetic diversity and milk production. 

Like any other aircraft operator, Zipline doesn’t want any midair collisions. Keenan Wyrobek, the company’s CTO, says that in the US especially, navigating the airspace can be tricky. Low-flying planes from regular folks out cruising for fun in a Cessna, or someone operating a crop duster, or a helicopter, may not have a transponder announcing their location. “A lot of these planes, they’re just not required to carry transponders,” Wyrobek says. “There’s kind of a wild west spirit of aviation in this country.”

While a human flying a small plane has the responsibility to look ahead and avoid hitting another aircraft such as a hovering helicopter, in the case of the drone, the UAV needs to take action to avoid being hit itself. “It’s actually the job of the drone to see that Cessna coming up on them, and get out of the way,” Wyrobek says. The pokey cowboy, in this instance, has to make way for the cowhand galloping much faster. 

That raises some questions, which are concerns that don’t just apply to this one company: How can a drone, with no human on board to use their eyes to look out for traffic that might smash into it, get out of the way of a fast-flying plane? How can it identify the threatening traffic in the first place?

[Related: An electric aircraft just completed a journey of 1,403 miles]

The solution to this larger problem, in Zipline’s case at least, does not involve radar, cameras, lidar, or other sensors, which tend to be approaches commonly used in the autonomous car space. Instead, the drone company has decided to employ microphones that can listen for other aircraft, and then have the drone get out of their way. 

The setup goes like this: A total of eight microphones, each one placed on a probe protruding from the leading edge of the 11-foot wing, comprise the sensor array tasked with detecting other aircraft. The system needs to be able to ignore the ambient noise of the drone itself—the air around the drone, and its own propeller sounds—and just listen for other flying machines. “The array is important to both help with getting enough signal-to-noise to hear the planes far away, but also to figure out where the planes are,” Wyrobek says. That way it can “triangulate where those planes actually are coming from.” 

To do this trick, the drone relies on a small amount of onboard computing power. “It’s a combination of signal processing techniques—like beam forming—as well as machine learning, AI-based techniques in order to actually localize where that aircraft is,” he says. A small onboard GPU helps with this job, as those types of chips are good at handling AI-related tasks. Wyrobek says that fortunately, the microphones don’t produce that much data. “The actual information pipe is so small, [so] it’s not a big compute load,” he adds. 

To build the system, they collected training data that included some 15,000 planned interactions between a drone and a human-crewed aircraft like an airplane or helicopter. Of course, microphones aren’t going to be too helpful in the case of a hot air balloon or a glider, but Wyrobek says that one fortuitous benefit of this approach is that fast-moving aircraft also tend to be louder, meaning that the signal from a quicker-moving threat is stronger. 

For now, the company is waiting for regulatory approval to let the software onboard the drone make decisions to take evasive action to avoid an aircraft that might hit it, which would involve a maneuver such as proactively turning out of the way and entering a holding pattern until the coast is clear. Currently, the microphones are installed in some of the drones, even if the whole system isn’t switched on, yet. “The microphones think they’re in control, but they’re not,” he says; the team examines the data from them post-flight to “make sure what it wanted to do is what it should have done.” 

Wyrobek anticipates using the sound-based detection and avoidance software in many regions where they operate. “In most places, I think we’ll use it,” he says. “As we scale, we want to keep increasing our safety, and this is a way to do that.” From an airspace management perspective, that sounds good. 

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The United Kingdom wants a new drone for its military, one small enough that soldiers can bring it into battle and abundant enough that it can be easily replaced. When it comes to finding this goldilocks flying bot, the UK is hoping to buy off-the-shelf and modify as needed. The Ministry of Defence is awarding a contract worth £3 million (roughly $3.8 million) to drone-maker Skydio for the delivery of X2D drones plus artificial intelligence and sensor systems. The award, announced May 18 by Skydio and partner company Marlborough Communications Limited, is part of a broader program to bring new tools into the British military, all while building off innovation that already exists in the market.

Through its Future Capabilities Group, part of the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Equipment and Support office, the United Kingdom is looking to find and field “nano Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” or nUAS. The Skydio X2D is small: It weighs about 3 pounds, and when folded up is about a foot long by 5.5 inches wide. But the UK fields even smaller drones, like the sparrow-sized Black Hornet.

“The latest nUAS will offer a great deal more capability than seen previously in the nUAS weight class,” the office declared in its March 2021 magazine, “expanding on the reconnaissance and surveillance build of previously employed systems to also encompass night surveillance, weaponised, obscuration/distraction payloads and communications rebroadcasting.”

[Related: The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers.]

Small drones offer a unique promise and potential for militaries. By fitting into the backpacks or pockets of soldiers, a little UAV allows a squad to gain an overhead view of the surrounding terrain and even perhaps the positions of enemies. This capability can be provided by cheap, commercial drones bought off the shelf, but with those drones comes the risk that unencrypted communication between drone and pilot could give away the squad. Using a dedicated drone, built on commercial parts but with specific changes made to military security requirements, is one way to match the usefulness without bringing in additional risk. That’s a kind of approach the Ministry of Defence is trying with Skydio’s drones.

This logic was at the heart of the United States’ “BlueUAS” program, to create a commercial-style and similarly priced drone acceptable to the Pentagon. Skydio is one of the companies producing BlueUAS gadgets for the military, and the UK’s Ministry of Defence is piggybacking on that drone model to meet its own needs.

Skydio boasts that, as a baseline feature, its drones have sensors and programming to automatically avoid obstacles in any direction, and to operate at night. In addition, a special autonomy program “enables the drones to deliver total situational awareness with six 4K cameras building a map of the surroundings, and deep learning algorithms and AI able to understand and predict future scenarios to inform decision-making,” Marlborough Communications Limited and Skydio said in the release.

[Related: How drones are helping fuel propaganda in Ukraine]

The Ministry’s use of Skydio drones included 90 of them that they purchased and tested in 2020, with nearly that many adopted the next year. It is, as the Defence Equipment and Support office describes it, part of a “Buy-And-Try-At-Scale procurement model, which puts technologically advanced equipment in the hands of troops far quicker than would traditionally expected.”

While much of the announcement focused on cost, at the heart of the drone and software is a promise that better and faster processing of data on the battlefield will make soldiers more effective in combat. The push towards greater integration of robotics is paired with a push for greater use of data, as part of an integrated plan for fighting war in the 21st century using the tools of that century.

“A mix of crewed, uncrewed and autonomous systems look set to make a step change in lethality and utility,” reads the Integrating Operating Concept, an August 2021 outline of how the Ministry is planning for future wars. “The pervasive nature of data – private, commercial, governmental and military combined – gathered from constellations of sensors and crunched at speed by artificial intelligence, will make it extremely hard to hide today’s military signature anywhere on the globe.”

Skydio drones are hardly the only models acquired and tested in accordance with this concept. In March, the UK’s Future Capabilities Group acquired Torch-X drones from Elbit and the self-contained swarm-pods of AtlastNEST. These robots will help the Ministry explore drone swarming and integration of new robots to existing vehicles and formations. 

These purchases fall under a general pattern of exploring the robotizing of the armed forces, with ground robots and space systems tested alongside flying machines. While it’s easy to treat each system as a siloed-off development, with success independent from the rest of the robots, the ability to share data and work together could mean a vast array of useful drones is more than just the sum of its robots. Using flying drones like a Skydio to map out a compound before sending in ground robots that navigate based on the scouted map, could preserve not just the lives of the human soldiers following behind, but could ensure that legged robots can safely navigate brand terrain. 

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In the sun-scorched desert of White Sands Missile Range, a Raytheon-built laser weapon mounted on an armored vehicle shot down multiple mortar rounds over four weeks of testing, the company announced May 16. The testing, part of an Army program to develop new kinds of defenses against flying projectiles and other threats, also involved the laser defeating a range of drones. The demonstration is part of a growing effort to ensure that on future battlefields, troops can be protected from the range of attacks they are likely to face.

Raytheon describes its directed energy weapon as a 50 kilowatt-class high-energy laser. The company worked with defense contractor KBR’s subsidiary Kord to integrate that laser on a Stryker combat vehicle. Strykers are eight-wheeled armored transports, operated by a crew of two and with room for 9 troops to ride inside. The body of the vehicle is flexible enough that the US Army has adapted it for a variety of roles, including as the base platform for an array of already existing anti-air weapons. 

This role is called “Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense,” or M-SHORAD, and it is currently performed by Strykers featuring a turret that can launch Stinger anti-air missiles and Hellfire missiles, both of which can be used against tanks and aircraft as well. This is in addition to a 30-mm cannon and a regular machine gun, as well as sensors that help it find targets. 

[Related: The US is looking for a new anti-air missile]

Those weapons are all useful against many known threats, like attack helicopters and low-flying jets, but the Army itself acknowledged this as a stop-gap to a more long-term solution, dubbing the Stinger-armed Strykers as “IM-SHORAD,” with the I for “Interim.”

What the Army is aiming to field, and what the Raytheon demonstration showcased, is a durable anti-air vehicle that can stop not just drone attacks, but can also hit mortar rounds, like in the White Sands demonstration, and also stop rockets and artillery fired against US forces.

The military has long been interested in finding tools and weapons that can protect forces as they move from attacks in the low altitudes where drones fly and mortar rounds arc over hills towards their targets. This is a hard problem: stopping rockets, artillery, or mortar attacks from hitting troops, vehicles, or bases requires a system that can detect the incoming attack, plot the trajectory of the projectile, and then use a weapon to try and destroy as many of those projectiles as it can in time.

For ships and bases on land, counter-rocket, artillery, and mortar defense already exist in the Phalanx close-in weapon system used on ships, or the C-RAM variant used on land. (C-RAM is “Counter-Rocket Artillery Mortar.) These systems pair sensors with bullets to shoot down incoming projectiles, an effective method but one where the cost of fired bullets can add up over time.

Laser weapons are designed to offer interception at rates much cheaper than missiles, and even cheaper than bullets. “With an effectively infinite magazine and near-zero cost per shot, [High Energy Laser] is now the proven answer to asymmetric threats like drones and mortars,” Byron Bright, president of KBR Government Solutions said in a release. 

A laser system takes a lot of work to develop, from ensuring the beam is powerful enough to burn through what it’s targeting quickly, to pairing it with sensors that can find but also track targets until they are rendered inert or harmless. Once set up, however, laser systems promise lower costs per firing, with electrical power fueling the shots instead of the material of bullets or the sensors and material of missiles.

[Related: The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers.]

Many previous military laser weapons have been mounted on ships, where they can draw electrical power from the massive generators on board. Strykers are a much more confined space than a seagoing vessel like the USS Ponce, and getting it to reliably produce a beam of 50 kilowatt hours takes a tremendous amount of power storage and ability to discharge rapidly.

In 2013, Boeing demonstrated a 10 kWh high energy laser system, mounted in a truck the size of a shipping crate. Fitting more power into a smaller, constrained shell is essential for creating a more useful laser. The greater the power of the beam, the faster it can burn through a given drone, or mortar round, or other object. But it also increased the importance of such a defensive system working. Putting that much electrical power into a vehicle requires batteries and possibly capacitors, which can explode in catastrophic ways, especially if under fire in combat.

Still, in the absence of a reliable way to shoot down small armed drones or prevent artillery from hitting an armored column on the move, a laser-armed Stryer could prove useful all the same. In the same announcement as the successful demonstration, Raytheon said it is preparing to deliver four laser-armed Strykers to Army units later this year.

Watch a video about the tech, below.

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The Defense Innovation Unit, tasked with bringing commercial tech into the Pentagon, is set to announce in the next few weeks the approval of several more US-made hobbyist-style drones for military use. These drones will be compliant with Congress-mandated rules regarding the origins of their parts, military requirements for functionality, and the commercial industry’s aim of delivering new tech for the military that can be built and sold on a commercial scale to the public.

Currently, and in the past, forces fighting on both sides of Russia’s invasions of Ukraine—first the 2014 occupation of the Donbas and now the February 2022 invasion of the country—have used commercial drones in their fight. These machines, built from kits or purchased as complete and assembled products from a retailer, offered troops on the ground something never before available: cheap, easy access to an overhead view of their own position, and that of nearby enemies. 

This kind of commercial drone use in war has hardly been limited to Ukraine. In Syria and Iraq,  ISIS used improvised drones and commercial tech to hide and drop bombs since at least 2016, weapons they continued to employ as they were driven out of power by local forces with US support.

Troops in the United States, despite fighting against an enemy using commercial drones to drop bombs, have been discouraged—and then prevented by law—from using the same drones unless they can get special permission to fly them. This fight over “Commercial Off-The-Shelf” (COTS) Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) has meant that while the US remained adept at fielding expensive plane-sized high-end military drones, American forces were falling behind their peers in other militaries and even insurgents and irregular forces fielding the cheapest end of the drone spectrum.

At the crux of this fight is a concern that the sensors and computers for many of the most widely available commercial drones were made specifically in China. Members of Congress, and parts of the Department of Defense, worried that the potential existed for those sensors to collect and share information with someone other than the drone operator. For the troops experimenting with quadcopters, this risk remained abstract, until Department of Defense Inspector General reports made it concrete. (The Inspector General’s office is tasked with auditing and inspecting existing programs.)  

“In spring 2018, the Inspector General said, ‘Hey, there are COTS UAS that have cybersecurity vulnerabilities’ and we said, ‘shut up nerd, we’re doing hot drone shit,'” laughs Shelby Ochs, of the DIU. Before joining DIU, Ochs was a Marine officer, tasked with integrating commercial drones into military use, and the Inspector General reports were a hurdle to getting that done. Today, Ochs is program manager for Blue UAS at the Defense Innovation Unit, the team tasked with finding a balance between the legally mandated security constraints on cheap drones and delivering a product to the military useful and cheap enough to be expendable in the field. 

Following a second Inspector General report and then an outright ban from the Department of Defense leadership, the use of commercial drones by the military was prohibited in the summer of 2018. A waiver process, by which units could apply for temporary exemptions to the ban, wasn’t approved until December of that year. The problem with the waiver process, says Ochs, was that they “are evaluated by drone, by user, by use case [and] by location. And they’re often good for six months and they require a three-star [general’s] endorsement,” before an approval board hears the request.

In short, that’s a lot of hurdles to getting approval to fly a cheap drone, the kind people off-duty might just buy and use for fun in their spare time. At the same time, the Army was looking for a drone that could offer the simplest scouting need: looking one hill over, or around the side of a building. Something cheap, simple, and useful enough that soldiers could have it with them in the field, put it in the sky, and see just around the corner without risking anybody getting shot to scout it out first.

In May 2019, DIU gave $11 million to six companies to make the kind of drones the Army was looking for, closer to a commercial price point while still delivering that immediate over-the-hill capability. These companies included established commercial drone makers like Parrot and other entrants like Skydio and Altavian. The announcement promised drones that matched the requirement at the time, but a month later Congress took interest in regulating military drone purchases. 

This process was further complicated by the 2020 NDAA, the enormous annual defense authorization act introduced in June 2019 and passed in December of that year. Section 848, the “Prohibition on Operation or Procurement of Foreign-made Unmanned Aircraft Systems,” is just under 300 words, but it dictates major limits on the kinds of drones and drone parts that the military is allowed to purchase or use without a waiver. Chiefly, the act prohibited procuring drones that used “flight controllers, radios, data transmission devices, cameras, or gimbals manufactured” in China, and also prohibited the use of drones that would transmit or store data in servers in China as well.

“Drones are just the same Lego bricks put together in new, interesting ways, right?” says Ochs. “The same radios and cameras and computers.” As Ochs describes it, the limiting factor on making drones acceptable to Congress was a lack of US-made flight controllers, radios, data transmitters, cameras, and gimbals, at least not at the price point needed for these drones to be anything like hobbyist-model cheap.

“The Lego bricks didn’t exist to make the drones cheaper and more capable,” says Ochs.  

The Defense Innovation Unit describes drones that meet these requirements as Blue UAS, using the shorthand of “blue” to mean “US.” The program to create Blue UAS is “a holistic and continuous approach that will rapidly vet and scale commercial unmanned aerial systems” for the Department of Defense. In essence, it’s a way to use government requirements and funding to foster the kind of domestic commercial drone industry that can produce domestically made flight controllers, radios, data transmission devices, cameras, and gimbals for drones, at scale and cheap enough to see use on inexpensive drones.

Rather than waiting for a commercial drone market in the US to arrive on its own at selling fully compliant parts and models for military use, DIU funded the development of drones through its Blue UAS. “Sometimes the market needs a little bit of help,” said Ochs. “We’re just providing them the opportunity.”

In other words, the goal wasn’t to reinvent the commercial drone industry from scratch, it was to make sure that there were US-made “Lego bricks” that manufacturers could plug into existing drone templates—ones that met the Pentagon’s desired cybersecurity needs and the mandate passed by Congress.

Looming over the development of Blue UAS is the size and strength of hobbyists drones made in China, most notably the cheap models produced by drone giant DJI. The company, which makes the popular Phantom and Mavic series of quadcopters, has seen its drones used in wars, and is emphatic that this was never an intended or permitted use of the drones. “We don’t market our products toward military use, nor do we sell direct to commercial or industrial users,” DJI spokesman Michael Oldenburg told defense industry magazine C4ISRNET in 2019.

On April 21, 2022, DJI reaffirmed that the same sentiment and said it “has unequivocally opposed attempts to attach weapons to our product.” On April 26, it announced that it was temporarily suspending all business in Russia and Ukraine in light of the war. Both the statement and the suspension affirm what observers have long seen, which is that a cheap and easy-to-fly camera-carrying drone is useful in war, despite the intentions of the manufacturers.

With DJI explicitly not wanting to supply militaries, and with the Department of Defense prohibited from buying DJI drones anyway, Blue UAS is an attempt to spur the market to create cheaper drones with legally compliant parts. Some of this scale will come from military orders, but much of it, as imagined, will also come from the companies being able to sell drones made with the same parts to hobbyists in the US and around the world. These drones may even draw from some supply chains in China for their plastic parts, even while the companies insist all electronics are assembled outside of that country. 

Later this spring or early with summer, DIU expects to announce several more drones that have been approved through its Blue UAS process (here’s the current cleared list). What will ultimately matter more than the specific models of drones, though, is the creation of a process and a market that can produce the drone parts the Pentagon wants. In the next few years, if the program lives up to its expectations, when soldiers and marines venture into the field, they’ll be able to toss new drones into the sky, secure in the knowledge that the machines are secure enough for combat, and cheap enough that it won’t be a big deal if the drone doesn’t make it back from the mission.

“If we believe robotics are gonna enable future warfare, then they have to be low cost so that we are able to use them and lose them without fear,” says Ochs.

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To mark our 150th year, we’re revisiting the Popular Science stories (both hits and misses) that helped define scientific progress, understanding, and innovation—with an added hint of modern context. Explore the entire From the Archives series and check out all our anniversary coverage here.

Thirty years ago, the noxious clouds of chlorofluorocarbons that had been gathering in Earth’s stratosphere for half a century would chew a seasonal hole in the protective ozone layer over Antarctica twice the diameter of Pluto. While the Antarctic feature was extreme, it underscored a disaster unfolding across Earth’s atmosphere. With less ozone in the stratosphere to shield flora and fauna from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, crops would suffer and skin cancer would soar. 

By the time Popular Science ran a feature in July 1992 describing the urgent efforts of scientists across the globe to understand the dynamics of ozone destruction, our outlook was dire. “Earth’s ozone shield seems to be failing,” wrote Popular Science Senior Editor Steven Ashley, “and researchers need to find out why—fast.” According to Ashley NASA had pulled out all the stops, building a robotic data-gathering drone to ply Earth’s polar vortex—the upper reaches of the atmosphere over Antarctica. The craft, called Perseus, used GPS and a programmed route to sniff out ozone. 

 In 1987, every country on Earth (a first and only) ratified a treaty to reverse the damage. The Montreal Protocol established guidelines to rapidly phase out a list of 100 manufactured chemicals called ozone depleting substances or ODS. Since Popular Science’s feature ran in 1992, ODS emissions have been reduced by 98 percent. And while the Antarctic ozone hole fluctuates in size and severity year to year, driven by myriad factors including seasonal temps and moisture, an improving trend has been consistent. Experts forecast full recovery by 2070. Besides representing a rare environmental success story, there’s a lesson in ozone: Amazing things are possible—even on a planetary scale—when everyone gets on board.

Unfortunately, such unity has proved elusive for greenhouse gasses. Since 1992, world leaders have taken three swings at treaties to reduce the substances, the latest being the Paris Climate Agreement. None have achieved unanimity, although the Paris Agreement is close now that the US has rejoined.

“Ozone Drone” (Steven Ashley, July 1992)

The rupture of Earth’s ozone shield has become a global concern. But how can scientists gain the high-altitude data they need to find solutions? This unmanned power glider might be the answer.

Eighty thousand feet above Antarctica’s vast frozen expanse, a lone aircraft will cruise the stratosphere on long, tapered wings. The unmanned powered glider, called Perseus, is expected in 1994 to fly higher than any previous prop plane to find out what’s gone wrong with Earth’s stratospheric ozone shield. It will be programmed to search the cold, thin air over Antarctica for ozone-killing chemicals and bring back crucial air samples that have eluded atmospheric scientists for years.

The plane’s 14.4-foot, variable-pitch propeller—so long that it is unable to spin until Perseus is aloft—will require the robot craft to be hawed into the air from its base at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station by a winch-wound cable. Once airborne, its engine will be engaged and the cable detached.

Perseus will then spiral upward toward the center of the ozone hole at about 40 knots, reaching a speed of 200 knots at altitude. Although a technician will pilot the plane remotely via line-of-sight radio controls when it’s near the ground, Perseus will largely pilot itself. Its on-board flight computer will carry preprogrammed navigation commands based on data beamed from Global Positioning Satellites.

Ultimately, it is intended that sensors mounted in the craft’s nose will respond if the high-flying probe enters a wispy, pinkish assemblage of tiny ice crystals, a suspected hotbed of ozone destruction researchers call a polar stratospheric cloud. The computer on-board will direct the craft’s air-sampling apparatus to engage. When its sensors no longer detect the ice, Perseus will reverse course and continue to fly a zig-zag pattern in order to map the boundaries of the noxious cloud.

Total flight duration will be about six hours, with an hour for air sampling. Perseus can carry only enough fuel for the climb, so it will glide silently, after the engine halts, to a landing at its base on the ice shelf.

Such a flight cannot come too soon for scientists studying ozone depletion. Earth’s ozone shield seems to be failing and researchers need to find out why—fast. Last October, NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite measured the lowest Concentration of ozone over Antarctica in 13 years. This huge ozone hole has so far been restricted to the Southern Hemisphere, but NASA aircraft recently found an abundance of ozone-hole precursor chemicals high in the arctic air, raising the specter of a northern ozone hole. Perhaps even more alarming is the discovery of thinning ozone levels over the northern mid-latitudes, including populated areas of Canada and New England, Britain, France, and Scandinavia. (This past year’s conditions were unusually warm, say scientists, so no northern ozone hole materialized.)

Since 1988, pilots in NASNs ER-2 reconnaissance aircraft—converted U-2 spy planes—have climbed 13 miles above the remote and desolate polar regions to gather air samples for scientists. These missions are anything but routine. If one of the single-engine airplanes were to encounter trouble during these arduous eight-hour, 1,500-mile nights, the solo pilot would almost surely die.

So far, the returns have been worth the risks, however, for the high-flying collectors have provided scientists with the evidence they needed to implicate man-made chlorine compounds called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in ozone’s destruction and call for their ban. Nevertheless, researchers’ ability to further model and predict changes in the ozone layer are currently limited by a dearth of crucial air samples from the heart of the hole, which lies at altitudes beyond any piloted plane’s ceiling, says Jim Anderson, atmospheric chemist at Harvard University. Anderson, also mission scientist for NASA’s six-month-long Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Experiment-2, says that current atmospheric models (used to guide the government’s environmental policy decisions) lack information on chemistry and movement at altitudes near 15 miles, or 82,000 feet-a crucial area in the formation and destruction of ozone. “Satellites are good for broad-brush maps of simple measurements,” Anderson says, “but to understand the ozone-depletion mechanism you need both-satellites for the climatological view and direct measurements by air vehicles to understand the mechanism.”

Giant helium-filled research balloons have been used for decades to haul instruments to extreme altitudes, but these unwieldy craft are subject to the vagaries of the weather, leading to launch delays and occasional lost payloads. And the only available airplane that can fly high enough is Lockheed’s SR-71 Blackbird, but the black aircraft’s supersonic speed would make sampling impossible. Perseus, then, would seem to be poised to provide many answers.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained aeronautical engineer John Langford, president of Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. in Manassas, Va., is working to craft Perseus to offer extreme altitude capability, pilotless operation, and the ability to carry scientific instruments aloft at relatively low cost. The nucleus of the Aurora staff are veterans of the MIT Daedalus Project, which developed the lightweight, human-powered aircraft that was pedaled 69 miles between the Greek isles Crete and Santorin [“88- pound Pedal Plane,” Feb. ‘87]. The development of Perseus owes a lot to its seemingly simple forerunner.

Daedalus’ high-efficiency wings, designed by Mark Drela, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, kept the flimsy-looking composite craft airborne despite being driven only by its human engine. Langford and Drela knew that its long, thin wing shape would work in the thin air and extreme altitudes relevant to ozone sampling. “It was obvious that much of the airfoil and structures technology would be applicable to high· flying aircraft,” Drela recalls.

The need for a low-cost, high-altitude, unmanned platform for in situ atmospheric research was established a few years ago by a panel of experts from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Science Foundation. Besides ozone chemistry, the panel wanted a vehicle that could help determine the role of clouds in global warming, investigate a stratosphere/troposphere mixing phenomena for a new Department of Energy study on climatic change, find the causes of severe storms, and assess the impact of future supersonic airliner exhaust emissions [“The Next SST,” Feb. ‘91].

“The key point was that the vehicle be available in the 1993-’94 time frame,” recalls Jennifer Baer-Riedhart, project manager of the resulting Small High-Altitude Science Aircraft program at NASA’s Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility in Edwards, Calif. Aurora, already well on its way to developing such a craft, was awarded a $2.25 million, two-year NASA contract to deliver two Perseus planes.

To keep costs down, Langford notes that the strategy has been to modify off-the-shelf components and existing designs, rather than developing custom technology.

The result is a lightweight 1,320 pound), “unmanned version of a sailplane,” Langford says, with a 59- foot wingspan and low-drag aerodynamic design. The wings, propeller, tail surfaces, and tail boom are molded from resin-impregnated Kevlar aramid cloth, Nomex honeycomb cores, and graphite cloth.

“Perseus’ composite structure is like that of a sport glider pushed to extremes,” says Siegfried Zerweckh, who has worked as leader of Aurora’s aerostructures group. “The fact that the plane is unmanned and that its structures don’t have to perform forever like those of a commercial aircraft [that is, without an inspection following each flight] means that we can push the materials to the limit.

“We use sandwich construction for stiffness in almost every part, including the wings, tail surfaces, and tailboom,” Zerweckh continues. The three-piece, 30-foot wings, for example, have only four ribs supporting them in the span-wise direction, 80 the structural sandwich panels must be largely self-supporting. A 19.7-foot· long wing panel, for instance, weighs in at 170 pounds. The result is a relatively light structure.

An on-board flight control/navigation computer, a fly-by-wire electronic control system, and an unusual closed-cycle propulsion system complete much of the plane’s bulk. NASA thought Perseus’s propulsion system was important enough to the success of the project to fund it in a separate, half-million-dollar effort.

In keeping with Aurora’s penchant for classical monikers, the propulsion system for Perseus was dubbed Arion. It is an unusual closed-cyc1e system that includes a liquid-cooled, 65-horsepower rotary Norton, a two-speed reduction gearbox with provisions for clutching and locking the propeller, a stiff carbon-fiber drive shaft, the large, variable-pitch propeller, storage tanks for gasoline and liquid oxygen, and a large condenser to cool the exhaust.

Much of this is the work of Martin Waide, former chief engineer for Aurora, who has been an engineer for Group Lotus in Britain and various American manufacturers of military remotely piloted vehicles.

A closed-cycle combustion engine system, which was chosen for Perseus because it was cheapest and fastest to develop, derives from work done for torpedoes and submarines. Instead of compressing external air in a heavy, expensive turbocharger to maintain power, the engine exhaust is fed back into the intake along with fuel and oxygen. Senior propulsion engineer Stephen Hendrickson reports that the entire engine complement was ground tested in May—successfully.

Burning the fuel-air mixture produces exhaust temperatures of nearly 2,000° Fahrenheit, which ordinarily would be dumped overboard. But because Perseus’s exhaust will be recycled, large radiators above the wing must carry off its heat. The Aurora team is developing large stainless steel and aluminum fin-and-tube-type heat exchangers that will work at low atmospheric pressure, where heat transfer is slow.

This past November, the prototype Perseus A reached nowhere near its extreme altitude goals in its maiden flights over the El Mirage dry lake bed in California’s Mojave Desert, limited as it was to a 3,000-foot safety ceiling. But the three short test flights provided data that will pave the way for high-flying missions two years hence, when Perseus A will be airlifted in pieces to McMurdo Station. There, a ground crew of seven will quickly assemble and prepare the aircraft for launch.

Harvard’s Anderson designed the lightweight, nose-mounted instrument package that Perseus will carry. His 110-pound air sampling/analysis system employs an optical ultraviolet-absorption technique to measure ozone concentration and a more sophisticated photon-scattering apparatus that measures the levels of ozone-destroying precursor compounds in parts per trillion. In March, NASA balloon specialists completed a series of difficult test flights during which the miniaturized sensor package and its’ electronics survived -80°C temperatures when they were lofted from the western coast of Greenland.

A widely held theory reported recently by Anderson and two colleagues spells out why tracking these precursor compounds is so vital.

It is known that unimpeded ultraviolet (UV) radiation can cause skin cancer, cataracts, disabled immune systems, as well as disruptions of natural ecosystems and agriculture.

In winter when the sun leaves the poles, the stratospheric air rapidly becomes so cold that nitric acid trihydrate (NAT) in the air freezes. These tiny nitric acid crystals seed the formation of water-ice particles, which gather into wispy, pinkish clouds (the very clouds that Perseus’ detectors will be trained on).

As soon as the ice-nitric acid particles form, fast reactions involving hydrochloric acid and chlorine nitrate occur on the ice surface, which acts as a catalyst (see The Chlorine Connection). The former is adsorbed onto the edges of the crystals, while collisions of the ice particles with the latter liberates molecular chlorine (C12). “Nobody expected that the ice surfaces would act as catalysts for the release of molecular chlorine,” Anderson says.

While the polar air masses cool, they sink. As surrounding air flows in to take the cold air’s place, the Coriolis Force—caused by the spinning Earth—steers the in-rushing air into continent-size rotating jets. These polar vortices act as semi-impermeable walls, isolating the air inside them. Despite the polar subsidence, the free molecular chlorine remains high up.

With the return of the spring sunlight, virtually all chlorine molecules split into free chlorine radicals—chlorine atoms hungry to recombine. This chlorine feeds a series of catalytic reactions that together destroy ozone.

“Free chlorine monoxide chews up ozone like Pac-Man,” Anderson notes. “At the concentrations we’ve observed-more than one part per billion by volume, we estimate that 1 percent of the ozone is lost each day.”

Later in the season, planetary-scale air waves pummel the polar vortices, breaking them up and replenishing the polar ozone. It’s thought that the arctic ozone hole has yet to form because the northern vortices are unstable due to nearby mountain ranges.

A number of scientists are aware that sampling the stratosphere is vital to finding a solution to our ozone depletion problems. Several other high-flying planes are planned. Already developed, but as yet unused, is the giant Condor pilotless aircraft, which was developed by the Boeing Co. of Seattle in a secret Defense Department project. The 20,000-pound Condor is powered by 8 pair of liquid-cooled, 175-hp Teledyne Continental engines with two-stage turbocharging and intercooling driving three-bladed, 16-foot-long props. Though the reportedly $20 million craft completed eight test flights in 1989, the government lacks the funds to operate it. In one of those flights, Boeing’s Condor set the world altitude record for propeller-driven aircraft at 67,028 feet. In another, the classified drone stayed aloft for two and a half days, flying an estimated 20,000 miles.

Other aircraft developers are taking the manned route. A German group from the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fiir Luft and Rahrfahrt (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhafen has proposed development of a two-seat plane called Strato·2C that is to be capable of reaching 85,000 feet or flying for 10,000 miles. The composite aircraft is to be powered by twin 402-hp Teledyne Continental engines with turbochargers.

Aurora’s engineers are planning several derivative versions of the Perseus “jeep” (as NASA terms the next larger size vehicle). Fitted with an efficient turbocharged engine, Perseus B could cruise for several days at somewhat lower heights than the A model to circle above hurricanes, for instance. With a 188-foot wingspan and twin pusher-prop power plants, Theseus—a “van”-size craft —could fly a 440-pound payload at around 100,000 feet for about a month. Farther down the road, the solar-powered Odysseus “truck” could cruise the stratosphere for as long as a year with a 110·pound payload on board.

By working to extend flight duration and elevation, these propeller-driven stratospheric cruisers may well come to act nearly as “poor man’s satellites.”

Some text has been edited to match contemporary standards and style.

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In April, when athletes gathered for an annual Texas triathlon, they did so while sensors from counter-drone company DroneShield scanned the sky, looking for any out-of-place drones that could be used for malicious intent. The contract, announced May 5, included ground-based radar and radio frequency sensors, as well as software to recognize and track drones. The company, now a regular feature at high-profile events with large crowds, exists as a modern tool for an especially modern kind of threat.

“We started the business about seven years ago, when we had a vision that drones were going to present a threat,” says DroneShield CEO Oleg Vornik. “It was not quite as obvious back then. People were asking us, ‘Well, a drone can fly maybe 50 meters smack against the nearest tree, and that’ll be the end of it. So why are you trying to do anything about drones used for nefarious purposes?”

Operating under the assumption that drone technology would improve over the intervening years, the company started looking at how to detect small, hobbyist-sized drones—the kind that could be flown purposely into a crowd of people to do harm. DroneShield’s first detection tool was an acoustic sensor, designed to pick up the specific buzzing sound of drone engines, as distinct from other ambient noise, and then offer the person using the sensor some information about the kind of drone found.

“We deployed at the Boston marathon—Boston police asked us to do that after the terrorist couple years earlier,” said Vornik. That deployment was for the 2015 Boston Marathon, and DroneShield has played a recurring role in security at the event ever since. Boston is especially sensitive to the possibility of technology built for one purpose used for another—as a weapon— because the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings were done by bombs made out of pressure cookers.

At events like the recent Texas triathlon, the function of DroneShield remains largely the same: Scan the skies for signs of drones, and then use that detection technology to locate the drones or drone operators if found.

[Related: West Point Cadets Are Shooting Down Drones With Cyber Rifles]

Stopping a drone once it has been detected is a trickier part of the task, because in most countries the authority to take down a drone rests with law enforcement. To offer government customers a way to stop drones without bullets, DroneShield built a gun-shaped jammer, with the form factor of a rifle and the aesthetic stylings of a weapon from a Final Fantasy game. (The modern versions now look like weapons out of a later-day Halo game or a 1980s Claremont-run X-Men comic, specifically.)

When it comes to finding the drones, DroneShield systems use a range of sensors, including some that are specifically useful at distinguishing between flying machines and flying animals. 

“We turned to radio-frequency based detection. A radar can be thought of as motion detection in the sky, and it confused drones with birds, especially fixed-wing drones with birds,” said Vornik. Radio frequency detection, besides not confusing birds for drones, has the added advantage of being a listening tool, passively picking up signals emitted by others instead of, like radar, pinging away and emitting signals. While this is less important for monitoring sporting events, DroneShield also markets its products to militaries, where giving away the location of the sensor could prove deadly.

To identify drones, DroneShield trained an AI on drone characteristics, like the patterns of motion seen on a camera or radio signals transmitted, and then looked for a match that is closest to the observed characteristics. DroneShield employs a range of detection technologies in different form factors, from body-wearable sensors to freestanding sentry towers. The sentry towers can include sensors offering passive radio frequency detection, radar, and cameras to find and identify drones, and can even mount jammers.

These sensors work at different ranges, creating overlapping fields of greater and lesser clarity in what can be seen and tracked. 

[Related: How drones are helping fuel propaganda in Ukraine]

While DroneShield aims much of its product at detecting and tracking commercial drones in safe airspaces, it found those same tools to have real military utility. This includes working in battlefield environments, like Ukraine. 

“We have supplied and are currently in discussions to hopefully supply more to the Ukrainians,” said Vornik, who did not specify which products had been sold to Ukraine. An April 2022 investor presentation from the company noted that an initial sale to Ukraine had been completed, with favorable in-field feedback. “We find interestingly that our products seem to be performing well in that environment. We were really curious how it was gonna go. It seems like the Russians, at least for some of their drones, are using Western commercial off the shelf parts, especially in something like the Orlan-10 drone, which had quite a lot of publicity in the news.”

The Orlan-10 is a smaller drone used as an artillery spotter and scout, and it is built on many parts common to commercial products. Because those parts are known in the hobbyist space, they are familiar to DroneShield’s AI in a way that exclusively Russian-made parts might not be.

“We have had our products deployed by Western forces in Syria, and that was our first deployment in that sort of situation,” says Vornik, “and that was well received.” The deployment included the DroneGun jammers, among other systems.

While DroneShield was willing to speak to the use cases of the systems, specifics of actual drone takedowns were less forthcoming, in part out of an obligation to the military or police agency that used the DroneGun or other products. 

DroneShield is just one of several companies in the growing counter-drone space. What is clear in 2022, in a way that was more theoretical a decade ago, is that commercial drones can be used to deadly effect on the battlefield, and could be used that way elsewhere. Figuring out how to detect, track, and stop drones before they are used to cause harm, without disrupting other communications or violating the law, is a hard problem, one DroneShield has spent years trying to answer.

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Dealing with wind is a part of flying through the air. Crosswinds can pose a challenge for pilots to overcome as they bring their airliners in for landings, or on a smaller level, a gust can push a drone around its small section of airspace. 

To give drones better maneuverability when flying in the wind, a team of engineers from CalTech have developed a deep neural network—an artificial intelligence tool—to allow a drone to be agile in the presence of blowing air. In a video, the researchers show off a quadcopter drone that, thanks to this software, can pull off figure-eight maneuvers and fly through a small gate, all in the presence of 27-mph-wind in a wind tunnel. 

The scientists first had to gather data to be able to train a neural network in order to make the flying machine pull off the stunts. It didn’t take much: just 12 minutes of flight time. “That’s very little data,” reflects Michael O’Connell, graduate student in the aerospace department at CalTech and one of the authors of a new study describing the work published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics. This AI-driven work is called Neural-Fly, and it follows other similar work called Neural Lander and Neural-Swarm. 

During training for this latest Neural-Fly experiment, the drone flew in a wind tunnel in the presence of six different wind speeds, with 13.4 mph being the fastest. “We basically teach the drone, ‘This is what it looks like when you’re hit by 5-mph wind, 10-mph wind,’” O’Connell says. “The drone is able to learn what wind looks like, and then when we go fly our figure-eight test trajectory, it uses that experience, and it says, ‘I’ve seen this before.’” 

From that data, the team created the deep neural network that then allowed their flying machine to be skilled at carrying out maneuvers in the same wind tunnel, like zooming through a gate in a figure-eight pattern or cruising through two gates in ellipse shape. The speed the drone experienced in testing were faster than what it had encountered in training: about 27 miles per hour. That’s the maximum wind speed this wind tunnel could produce, notes Guanya Shi, another author on the paper and grad student at CalTech. In addition to needing just a small amount of data, the software runs on just a Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive piece of computing equipment. 

Soon-Jo Chung, a professor of aerospace and control and dynamics systems at CalTech, and coauthor on the same paper, says that the rate of errors that they see with the new system is between 2.5 – 4 times better when comparing it to the existing “state of the art” tech for precise drone flying. The deep neural network flying the drone also has “adaptive control,” Chung notes, calling it a “breakthrough method.” This means that the AI can respond adaptively to what happens in real time with the wind. 

Chung sees applications for this machine-learning system when it comes to a future in which our skies could be filled with more drones. Companies like FedEx are looking into using large drones to help move packages from one spot to another, and Alphabet-owned Wing is delivering consumer goods via small drones in Texas. Meanwhile, other firms are working on electric flying machines that can carry humans—these are air taxis that can take off and land vertically. The plans for those range from craft designed to fly themselves autonomously with a passenger on board, to those currently planned around human pilots. 

Drones that need to have an “ultimate safety guarantee” could benefit from software like this, Chung says. “The ultimate example is obviously, the flying cars, because they have to carry human passengers.” 

“We are hopefully making that future where we can have safe unmanned vehicles that can survive potentially any wind conditions—tornadoes, hurricanes, and heavy storms,” Chung adds. “I cannot say that we can achieve that immediately using our Neural-Fly, but we are making one great step forward toward that goal.” 

After all, whether the drone is carrying packages or people, it needs to land safely on its pad, even if the wind is blowing in an unpredictable way. Without the promise of a safe landing, the mission might have to be scrubbed before it gets off the ground, or the flying machine rerouted to a different location if it’s already buzzing through the air. 

Watch a short video on the tech, below:

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Last week, the Department of Defense announced that it was sending “121 Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems” to Ukraine. This release was part of a broader package of arms and aid for the country that has, since February 24, been fighting against invading Russian forces. It also came as a surprise: the Phoenix Ghost drone appeared to be a brand-new weapon system, one so far never reported or revealed to the public.

As reported by Breaking Defense, the Phoenix Ghost is a drone-missile similar to the Switchblade already fielded by Ukraine. The Pentagon initially claimed the Phoenix Ghost was developed for Ukraine after Russia’s February 24 invasion, but Pentagon Press Secretary Jack Kirby clarified the development timeline, saying instead that the Phoenix Ghost was created before the invasion, and was “developed for a set of requirements that very closely match what the Ukrainians need right now in Donbas,” as Breaking Defense reported.

While February 24 marks the start of the current war in Ukraine, Russia and Russian-backed separatists have occupied parts of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine since 2014, and Ukrainian forces had fought that war for eight years. While it is unlikely that a new drone requested by the Air Force was built specifically for the terrain of the Donbas, it is a conflict that military planners have long pointed to to justify new capabilities and weapons. 

The public announcement of the drone from the DOD appears to have caught by surprise both the Air Force, which requested the system, and AEVEX Aerospace, the company that makes the Phoenix Ghost. When reached by reporters the day of the announcement, AEVEX had no public statement, and as of April 26, no news announcement about the drone had been posted to the company’s social media profiles or own site.

What is known about the Phoenix Ghost is hauntingly limited. The Pentagon described it as a “one-way” drone that will “deliver a punch,” and said it would be similar to operate for anyone who has already trained on a Switchblade or other drone system.

[Related: Everything to know about Switchblades, the attack drones the US is giving Ukraine]

As The War Zone reports, Kirby told the press that Phoenix Ghost differs in scope of capability from the Switchblade, though it’s similar in scope.

“I’m gonna be loath to get into much more detail about the system at this point for classification purposes, but you can safely assume that, in general, it works,” Kirby told reporters. “It provides the same sort of tactical capability that a Switchblade does. Switchblade is a one-way drone if you will, and it clearly is designed to deliver a punch. It’s a tactical UAS, and Phoenix ghost is of that same category.”

If the Phoenix Ghost retains the tube-launched form of a Switchblade, it will likely offer the same kind of flexibility as a weapon that can be mounted on vehicles or carried by soldiers into combat. (Switchblades are fired from tubes and then can be guided or assigned to hit a target from a remote control station, letting the weapon fly and explode like a missile that can make sharp turns.) Areas to improve on Switchblade capabilities would likely be in the form of greater range, explosive payload, or flight time, any of which could enhance the ability of the drone to find and crash into enemy soldiers or vehicles.

[Related: The US is looking for a new anti-air missile]

While AEVEX’s website is silent on the Phoenix Ghost, instead it shows off other services and components for sale like sensors and image processing. This includes tools that use drone cameras to map the surrounding terrain and navigational sensors. It’s the latter that might make an appearance in the Phoenix Ghost, as better navigation could lead to more accurate attacks, especially when the weapon is small enough that exact placement on the top armor of a vehicle matters. That, plus the ability to fly longer than existing Switchblades, could make the Phoenix Ghost useful in the kind of counter-offensive pushes currently undertaken by the Ukrainian military.

Fighting against Russian tanks and artillery in entrenched positions, ones dug in Ukrainian territory, will require Ukraine’s military to give up the advantages that defined its early war effort, like maneuvering out of the way of incoming tank columns before ambushing those same columns at night. 

While the Phoenix Ghost’s design reportedly predates the start of the invasion, and just happens to have coincidentally matched the conditions of the war, the Pentagon is asking companies that make weapons if they have anything else that might be useful to deliver to the fight. 

In a notice posted April 22, the Defense Logistics Agency announced it is seeking information “from across industry on weapons systems or other commercial capabilities related to air defense, anti-armor, anti-personnel, coastal defense, counter battery, unmanned aerial systems, and communications (e.g., secure radios, satellite internet).” The Switchblade, and likely the Phoenix Ghost, can be reasonably described as anti-personnel unmanned aerial systems, with the potential for models with larger explosive payloads to be anti-armor as well. Companies making or considering making other such weapons, to defeat everything from ships to artillery, have been invited by the Pentagon to see if their new weapon can prove useful in the hands of Ukraine’s military.

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When it comes to clearing the ocean of explosives, the British Royal Navy is turning to robots. Announced April 12, the Ministry of Defense is awarding £32 million (about $42 million) to Dorset-based company Atlas Elektronik to give the fleet an “autonomous mine-hunting capability.” Employing robots to hunt and clear the sea of naval mines should make waterways useful for military missions and safe for commercial and civilian use afterwards.

“The threat posed by sea mines is constantly evolving,” said Simon Bollom, CEO of the UK’s Defence Equipment and Support Board, in a statement.

To meet this changing threat, the Royal Navy is acquiring a total of nine robotic vehicles, equipped with synthetic aperture sonar and advanced software. The robots, known as Medium Autonomous Underwater Vessels once in service, are based on Atlas Elektronik’s SeaCat, a modular robot with a torpedo-shaped body and a range of sensors and systems it can mount.

The SeaCat can operate in shallow waters, less than 7 feet deep, by moving along the surface, and it can reach depths of up to 1,970 feet under the surface, traveling as far as 23 miles autonomously. The base model of the SeaCat can operate for up to 10 hours under water, traveling as fast as 3.5 mph. Synthetic aperture sonar offers higher resolution images of objects underwater, making it useful for both geographic surveying and mine detection. 

The threat of mines is not theoretical. In late March, Turkish military divers defused a naval mine that had drifted towards its Black Sea coast. A Russian intelligence agency accused the mine of being Ukrainian, while Ukraine’s government called the claim misinformation. The explosive was identified only as an old type of mine, which means it could be from a prior conflict, or an old weapon pressed into service in the recent war. 

A terrible thing that waits

Like landmines, sea mines are an explosive paired with a trigger, allowing the weapons to wait until a certain condition is met before detonating. In war, sea mines are placed, like landmines, to obstruct passage through a crucial area, making any attempt to escape a mined harbor or cross a mined strait an exercise in explosive hazard.

Modern sea mines date back to the 1870s, when engineers figured out how to keep a trigger intact without the sea eroding it. These mines—explosive spheres with protruding rods—would trigger when a ship collided with the rod, breaking a vial inside and setting off an electrical charge. The mines would wait until a ship collided with the trigger rod, floating on or below the surface of the water and often anchored in place to prevent drift.

Once engineers solved the problem of creating an explosive that could wait at sea, navies had to figure out how to clear those explosives from the water safely. Over 100 years ago, in “The Making of a Submarine Mine” in the January 1916 Popular Science, the magazine discussed methods of making short-duration mines, as well as defusing already-placed mines with electrical fuses.

Before mines can be defused, they must be found. This was initially the work of small motorboats, though the work is dangerous and risks the lives of human crew. Mines also become more sophisticated over time. Before World War I concluded, sea mines could trigger on sound, magnetism, or changes in water flow. Because mines from all eras can persist in the ocean, modern mine clearing has to accommodate for old and modern triggers. 

Remote workers

Like with the mine in Turkey, underwater explosives are often defused by teams of human divers. This work combines the hazards of on-ground explosive disposal with the additional difficulty of being underwater, with visibility limited depending on the depth and condition of the sea. It’s a job people have outsourced to robots as much as they possibly can, trusting remotely operated machines to take on the risk at distance from human operators. 

The United Kingdom, together with France, has already invested in multiple robots that can defuse mines once located. Once found and tracked, a specific mine-defusing robot can be launched to place an explosive on the surface of the mine, before retreating so the new explosive can detonate the found mine.

What the Royal Navy’s new robots will do is improve the process of finding and neutralizing mines, scanning and patrolling the sea on their own autonomous navigation. This saves the human labor for operating remote robots and managing detonations, as the new craft scan the ocean to find any explosives still in the water.

As sea mines continue to find utility in war, and even more as mines continue to persist long after wars end, navies being able to clear the oceans of explosive detritus will prevent tragedy at sea.

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GoPro has just announced a surprising new camera: a stripped-down version of its Hero10 Black called the Hero10 Black Bones. For an extra $50, it weighs a lot less but doesn’t come with a battery or screen. Confused? Here’s what you need to know.

What is the Hero10 Black Bones?

The GoPro Hero10 Black costs $499.99 (or $349.99 with a 1-year GoPro Subscription). It has a rechargeable battery, front and rear screens, and is waterproof to 33 feet, but weighs 5.4 ounces.

The GoPro Hero10 Black Bones, on the other hand, costs $499.99 (or $399.98 with that GoPro Subscription), doesn’t have a battery, has no screens, and isn’t waterproof, but weighs just 1.9 ounces.

Crucially, both come with the same great 1/2.3-inch sensor and GP2 processor, HyperSmooth 4.0 in-camera stabilization, and the ability to shoot 5.3K footage at 60 fps, 4K footage at 120 fps, and 2.7K footage at 240 fps. 

Who is the Hero10 Black Bones for?

Okay, so there is a reason that GoPro is stripping out a load of headline features from its flagship action camera and then charging an extra 50 bucks to save 3.5 ounces. 

The Hero10 Black Bones is designed exclusively for first-person view (FPV) drones—the kind of drone that’s often used to shoot footage like Tesla’s recent fly-through of its Gigafactory in Berlin or the video of a drone flying through a bowling alley that went viral last year. These drones normally have a low-latency camera connected to a VR headset so the pilot can fly, and a second camera (often a GoPro but sometimes a 35mm film camera!) to capture high-quality footage.

In an interview with The Verge, GoPro Head of Product, Pablo Lema, explains that many of these FPV pilots have already taken to chopping the bits they consider unnecessary off their GoPros in an attempt to lighten them so the drone can stay in the air longer. The DIY approach, however, is not without its downsides. According to Lema, this often leads to the camera overheating, especially on takeoff or landing. 

The Hero10 Black Bones is GoPro doing the weight saving for FPV pilots, and adding a heatsink and some venting to solve any overheating issues. Sure, as a niche product it is a bit more expensive, but it still has a warranty unlike a Franken-GoPro that someone has taken a knife to. 

How does the Hero10 Black Bones work without a battery?

In a word: soldering. 

The Hero10 Black Bones is designed to be connected to your drone’s battery through its Power Connector port. It’s got a built-in regulator circuit so it can run off anything from 5V to 27V, depending on what LiPo battery is keeping your drone in the air. 

How do you control the Hero10 Black Bones?

Since there are no screens, controlling the Hero10 Black Bones is a little different. There are a few ways though:

• The two physical buttons on the camera.
• The $80 GoPro Remote.
• The GoPro Quik app.
• QR codes.
• By soldering a control wire to your drone, and using a flight controller software like Betaflight. 

How to buy a Hero10 Black Bones

If you’re in the US, you can buy a Hero10 Black Bones from GoPro right now for $399.98 with a Go-Pro subscription, or $499.99 without one. (Yes, it’s odd to us too.) 

To get the most from it, however, you’ll also need your own custom FPV drone—and some soldering skills. 

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Wing, the drone delivery division of Google-parent-company Alphabet, announced on Monday that it will launch its first US commercial service on April 7 in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. It’s starting small, initially serving “tens of thousands of homes” in two suburbs: the City of Frisco and Town of Little Elm.

This is a first, with a few caveats. Wing has both operated in the US—it tested its service in both Virginia and the same Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs—and operated a commercial service in Australia and Finland. Still, this is the first time that regular US consumers will be able to order an item via drone delivery with a tap in an app. 

Wing will offer products from a limited number of stores to start. It partnered with Walgreens for its initial testing in Frisco and Little Elm, so customers will be able to order a selection of health and wellness products. For the commercial service, it’s also announced prescription pet medications from Easyvet, first aid kits from Texas Health, and ice cream from Blue Bell Creameries. So yes, ice cream arriving from the sky (sky-ce cream?) is a real thing in the United States in 2022. 

Rather than using one central base, Wing has placed what it calls “nests” of drones next to participating stores. It says that in the future, these can be deployed in parking lots, adjacent empty space, and even on rooftops. When an order comes in, employees at the participating store pack the items into a special cardboard box then load it onto a delivery drone. Wing then takes over the operation of the drone, managing the flight to the customer’s home, where it will hover at around 23 feet. It then lowers the package on a tether, automatically releasing it on the ground before flying back to its base to recharge. According to Wing, the customer doesn’t have to do anything.

Wing’s drones are pretty impressive. They have both hover motors and cruise motors. The hover motors enable it to take off and land vertically, as well as hover in place so it can load and unload packages. The cruise motors, along with a fixed wing, allow it to fly at up to 65 mph, giving it a six-mile range and, assuming there are no delays, a six-minute delivery time.

To avoid air traffic control requirements, the drones stay low, flying at under 400 feet—and generally less than 150 feet. Wing’s software takes weather and other drones into account when plotting a safe route to the delivery zone. Apparently, they fly autonomously but are supervised by trained pilots. Presumably, Wing is keeping the exact operational details hushed up for commercial reasons. 

The drones were built with food delivery in mind. They are designed to stay stable during all stages of flight, even when they’re taking off or delivering the package. Each drone has a payload capacity of less than three pounds. For context, should Wing partner with McDonalds in the future, that would be enough for six Big Macs, though if you sprung for a meal, the drink is going to take up quite a bit of potential food capacity. In other words, don’t expect a drone like this to be delivering oodles of stuff. 

And while all this is exciting, it’s worth stepping back and considering the viability of drone deliveries as a whole. Amazon has gutted its UK-based Prime Air division, while UberEats has kept quiet about its drone plans since they were announced in 2019. As much as Wing trumpets the commercial nature of its delivery service (200,000 total deliveries as of March this year), commercial doesn’t necessarily mean profitable. Without its parent company’s deep pockets, Wing’s drones clearly wouldn’t be viable—especially as it will offer free delivery to customers in Frisco and Little Elm. 

The only US drone delivery service that appears to be doing more than viability testing is Zipline. It has also completed more than 200,000 commercial deliveries, but of medical supplies to US, Rwandan, Ghanaian, and Nigerian hospitals. It raised $250M in funding last year, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. 

And in other drone news, FedEx recently partnered with a company called Elroy Air that makes a very large drone, but FedEx’s intention is not to use them for deliveries, but instead, “middle mile” logistics. 

Wing’s deliveries are slated to begin tomorrow, but what the skies actually hold for this kind of service remains to be seen. But, there are more than 7 million people in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, so if the nest model takes off, it could expand to many potential customers pretty quickly. 

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This story was published in partnership with The Center for Public Integrity. This is the ninth in a 10-part series on nuclear risk, military technology and the future of warfare in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A week before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, artillery fire crossed the static front line between Ukrainian and Russian-backed separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine. A Reuters photographer, in Kadiivka, reported hearing artillery fire on Feb. 17 but could not determine which side had fired. 

The exchange violated the Minsk II Agreement, a ceasefire in place since February 2015 designed to be the first part of reaching a political solution between Ukraine and Russia over the separatist question in Eastern Ukraine. Both sides had periodically renegotiated returns to the ceasefire agreement, including as recently as December 2021. The Feb. 17 shooting is easy to overlook in light of the massive Russian invasion that followed and overshadowed it. But it matters because it underscores how hard it can be for sides in conflict to start peace negotiations, to say nothing of the challenge of reaching peace beyond that. Without the ability to trust that a ceasefire will be honored, it is difficult for parties at war to meaningfully end hostilities.

When the current war in Ukraine ends, it will likely begin with a ceasefire, offering the possibility of a durable peace after the conflict. To get to that durable peace, the two militaries and governments in conflict must agree on some basis for trust. This was hard before, when the war was confined to one part of the country. It will likely be much harder now, with the horrors of war touching much more of the country. This week brought to light the massacre of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha during its occupation by Russian forces. War creates space for such horrors, and ending a war means first getting to a ceasefire with the military that permitted such violence.   

September 2014: Minsk I

Before Minsk II, there was Minsk I, agreed to in September 2014. Minsk I was the first negotiated ceasefire to the war in Donetsk, and it called for the terms of the ceasefire to be monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The OSCE already had a long history in Ukraine, including assisting with the disposal of unexploded bombs. To further secure  the ceasefire, the agreement included exchange of prisoners, rules about governing the contested area and a withdrawal of forces. An accepted annex to the initial agreement, proposed by the OSCE, banned landmines and drones from the area, except for drones flown by the OSCE mission to monitor compliance with the ceasefire. 

The OSCE mission in Ukraine began using drones to monitor for ceasefire violations in October 2014. These drones allowed the OSCE mission to track movements of people, vehicles, and larger weapons. Drones also gave the mission a way to operate even as freedom of movement for people on the ground became more restricted by fighting, land mines and unexploded bombs. These drones were also subject to attack, including jamming by electronic warfare, destruction with bullets and even capture at gunpoint. 

Landmines turn old battle lines into deadly barriers. While stable boundaries between countries can exist with landmines in the middle, as is the case with the Korean Demilitarized Zone, peaceful borders cannot. Drones provide a way to observe the status of a static frontier. They can also be used to track hostile movements and direct artillery fire. Leaving monitoring to a third party, like OSCE, would let both sides trust that drones overhead were monitoring, not scouting for attacks.

But Minsk I was repeatedly violated by Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists, and utterly broken in January 2015 when separatist forces advanced beyond the line of control and claimed new territory, with separatist forces capturing the Donetsk airport.

February 2015: Minsk II

Minsk II, signed in February 2015, named specific weapon systems that had to be pulled back to create a declared security zone. For some artillery, this was a withdrawal of 30 miles. For longer-range artillery, like the Smerch multiple launch rocket systems, that range was increased to 87 miles. Monitoring compliance with these and other terms would fall to the OSCE, which would use satellites, drones and other tools to track violations.

The types of drones ranged from off-the-shelf DJI Phantom and Inspire quadcopters to the long-range Schiebel Camcopter S-100 helicopter drone, complete with infrared sensors. The drones let observers document the build-up of weapons in areas otherwise unreachable, and 3D scans from drone-carried sensors can be used to model damage to  buildings. Comparing scans before and after a hit can reveal the scale of the damage.

Sensors on the ground, placed in key areas, supplement the drones, passively watching  and documenting activity with normal and infrared cameras. These cameras can be obstructed by lights and pointed lasers, which itself is a kind of information about what is happening around the camera station.

Much as Russia’s military used the Donetsk war to test new weapons, the OSCE monitoring mission became a first testing ground for monitoring machines. The conflict became a testing ground for the technology of armistice, even as the ceasefire was violated.

One reason countries hesitate to agree to ceasefires, and may regularly violate them even once in place, is because ceasefires constrain military action. That is their explicit purpose, but when ceasefire violations come before new military advances, it reveals the conflict as unsettled. Monitoring by a third party can offer information to assuage fears of new military advances, but ceasefire violations can also be used as a pretext for new attacks.

Even after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, OSCE continues to monitor the war, though drastically reduced. OSCE’s foreign staff evacuated from Ukraine at the outset of the invasion, and monitoring functions were reduced to what could be done by those who remained. The Feb. 23 report, from the last full day before the invasion, recorded hundreds of ceasefire violations. A drone used by the monitoring mission encountered GPS signal interference, attributed to jamming.

What comes next?

For any post-invasion ceasefire to endure, it will need both Ukraine and Russia to enter it in good faith. The technology of ceasefire, of monitoring and tracking violations and then sharing that information publicly, can be used to build trust between adversaries. Monitoring alone is likely insufficient for a durable peace, as the longevity of the OSCE mission to Donetsk suggests.

Yet with the Russian invasion long since underway, one of the major threats to a peaceful settlement over Donetsk is gone. Russia has already gone to war to protect the claims of its declared separatist republics. 

But should peace come, the experience in Donetsk shows the kind of work that will need to be done to secure static front lines or verify a withdrawal. Drone flights, which for years have heralded coming artillery barrages, may instead buzz with the sounds of a negotiated end to the war, or at least a temporary reprieve. Agreeing to terms with enemies after a war can be profoundly difficult. Modern technology in the hands of a neutral party offers a chance for sides to verify, and then trust.

Speaking to Russian media March 27, Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy acknowledged that the end of the war would likely come with a compromise negotiated while Russian troops still occupied part of the country. On April 4, speaking in the town of Bucha, Zelenskyy emphasized a need to end the war by negotiations, but said the attacks on civilians made it harder. “It’s very difficult to conduct negotiations when you see what they did here,” Zelenskyy said. 

For other stories in the series, navigate here.

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Consider the idea of a package delivered by drone, and it’s easy to imagine a small flying machine depositing an item in a consumer’s driveway or backyard. And indeed, that’s what companies such as Wing, from Google’s parent Alphabet, are working on right now. But FedEx, which announced last week that it’s teaming up with a drone company called Elroy Air, has something else in store: an exploration of how to use drones for what they call “middle mile” logistics.

The drone in question is called the Chaparral, which Elroy took the wraps off of earlier this year. Here’s what to know about how it works, and how FedEx is thinking of using it.

The Chaparral isn’t small: It measures about 27 feet across, 19 feet long, and weighs some 1,900 pounds. The wing can be rotated so that the drone takes up less space in storage or transport. If you stood next to the tail, you’d find that it is taller than you, unless you stand about 7 feet in height. The aircraft can schlep about 300 to 500 pounds in a pod below its belly, and has a range of some 300 miles, meaning it could make it from New York to Boston. It’ll travel at speeds faster than 100 mph. The plane is autonomous—no pilots needed—and it can take off and land vertically. 

In short, think of it like other large flying machines that companies like Joby, Wisk, and Beta have in development; those craft are called eVTOLS, for electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. But unlike some of Elroy’s peers in this next-chapter-of-aviation space, the Chaparral aircraft is hybrid electric, not purely electric. It features 8 rotors on its wings to help it take off and land vertically, and four propellers for forward flight, and all of them are driven by electric motors. However, the source of that electricity is what makes this craft unique: it has a gas turbine and generator inside it to make that juice.

Within the aircraft, the gas turbine (it burns jet fuel) and generator produces electricity to feed those electric motors, and batteries inside allow the aircraft to store the juice. “We can actually boost the power that the engine is able to provide for those very high-power-consumptive moments in flight, as well as provide a backup to the engine,” says Terik Weekes, the aircraft’s chief engineer at Elroy. 

Kofi Asante, Elroy’s vice president of business development and strategy, argues that the hybrid-electric design is “a pretty big distinguisher for us compared to some of the other groups in the space,” he says. “It gets us the longer range; it allows us to make sure we don’t need charging stations at each one of the locations.” Asante says that the company isn’t just interested in commercial deliveries, but is also pursuing government and humanitarian opportunities. Regions such as West Africa or locales with many islands, like the Carribean, could be places where this uncrewed aircraft could help deliver items. 

So what are FedEx’s plans for this flying machine? Joseph Stephens, the senior vice president for global planning, engineering and technology at FedEx Express, says their intentions right now are to start testing out the Chaparral next year. He stresses that they are interested in using it for “middle mile” transport, so that it’s not replacing what the delivery vehicles do on your street. “This is going to be complementary,” Stephens says. Think about a truck delivering packages to a hub for air travel, and then an airplane delivering those packages to another hub: this drone would be used for the middle leg of a scenario like that. FedEx Express operates a range of ground vehicles and aircraft, with their airborne fleet including large planes like Boeing 767 and 777s as well as smaller ones, like the Cessna Caravan 208.

To get a sense of how many packages an aircraft like the Chaparral can handle, picture this: A typical FedEx delivery truck can carry some 700 to 1,000 pounds, so the 300 to 500 pounds the Elroy Air drone can transport represents about half of what a truck like that could carry, by weight. 

Meanwhile, the volume of packages that FedEx is delivering increased faster than they thought it would, Stephens says: A previous estimate had forecasted them carrying 100 million packages daily by the year 2026, but he says that they are now predicting 101 million packages per day for this year. That increase is “as a result of the pandemic,” he notes. 

Stephens says that they’re still working to determine where they will be testing the aircraft, but cites “remote Alaska” as the kind of place, domestically, that an aircraft like this could be used, perhaps winging packages to a far-flung village. “This would be a perfect opportunity for this particular aircraft, when you want to think in US terms,” he says. And because this drone can take off and land vertically and doesn’t need to be recharged with electricity, it does not need a typical runway or a charging station. 

See more about the aircraft, below:

Correction on April 12, 2022: This article has been updated to correct an error regarding the spelling of the name Terik Weekes.

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This story was published in partnership with The Center for Public Integrity. This is the fourth in a 10-part series on nuclear risk, military technology, and the future of warfare in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

On March 4, eight days into its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defense tweeted a video purporting to show a Russian-made Orion drone conducting an air strike against enemies inside the Donetsk region. 

Then there’s drone use by the other side: A Turkish-built drone that has become a sort of mechanical folk hero. In October 2021, Ukraine’s military used Bayraktar drones to attack separatists in the Donetsk region. Since Russia’s invasion, Ukranians have turned Bayraktar drones into a symbol of the war, complete with a song released online March 1.

“[The] Russians are carefully releasing videos of Forpost-R and Orion combat drones as well to try and compete with a Bayraktar narrative,” said Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, referring to Ukraine’s Bayraktar drone use. 

Drones, the expansive category of uncrewed flying machines guided remotely, are one of the defining weapons of 21st-century warfare. The origin of drones can be traced back at least as far as experiments with aerial torpedoes in World War I. What sets modern drones apart is their ability to capture footage in real-time of movement on the ground and to then use that video to direct attacks and, increasingly, to use the video as propaganda.

“This is an information war. It’s an information environment. What you see posted on Twitter and TikTok is not the whole battlefield picture. It’s just a small part of it,” Bendett said. Popular perception of the war is shaped by the videos people outside of combat can watch. This means that drones are a useful tool for controlling the perception of performance in war.  “And because Russians have ceded the information environment to the Ukrainians, the Ukrainians can run with it,” Bendett added.

Modern drones are used by militaries for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or, in general, scouting. When equipped with regular and infrared cameras, these drones allow remote operators to look for people and vehicles in daylight and at night. Militaries can use drones to find the coordinates of military targets, like a tank or a group of soldiers. If the drone is armed, a military can also use it to attack the targets it finds.

As sensitive military information, drone footage is classified by default, making any public release a deliberate choice. Both the U.S. and Israel, which have used military drones for decades, have selectively released video captured by drones. In 2008, the Israel Defense Forces released footage of a drone strike on what it claimed were terror operatives moving missiles in Gaza—one way to contest evidence that the drone strike targeted civilians.

Drone footage can shape public perception of military power and precision. Describing the use of drone footage by both Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020’s Nagorno-Karabakh war, analysts Michael Kofman and Leonid Nersisyan wrote: “A social media feed composed largely of drone video footage could lead one to believe in the dominance of such systems, even in a conflict where many casualties are still inflicted by armor, artillery and multiple launch rocket systems.”

As Putin’s war in Ukraine continues, it is increasingly likely that Russia’s Ministry of Defense will continue to release drone footage in an attempt to tell similar stories of competence and precision. And while drone footage will continue to be useful to tell the story of the war, the primary use of drones will be fulfilling their original missions, as flying scouts, sometimes armed, that can find targets for other, deadlier weapons.

The Russian military has had years of experience using drones, both in Syria and in support of separatists fighting Ukraine over the Donetsk region. Drones in Syria faced few modern anti-air defenses, so they could operate with little risk of being shot down. Drone tactics developed for open skies are hard to adapt to the more constrained airspace of a large war against a modern military.

As a result, much of the documented evidence of Russian drones in combat comes through images shared on social media of shot down, crashed, or destroyed machines. The images of destroyed drones suggest a broad range of machines used by Russia, even if Russia has been slow to share video from its drone strikes. 

These shot-down drones include Forpost-R, an armed scout based on an Israeli design, which can be used for attacks like Ukraine’s Bayraktar. Other Russian drones observed shot down in the war include Orlan-10s, a small scout used as an artillery spotter. Without spotters directing fire, it is harder to use artillery accurately, especially against moving targets.

Beyond the spotter drones, observers have reported wreckage of Kub loitering munitions, which are missiles in the airframe of a drone. These weapons, in a similar fashion to the U.S.-made Switchblade drones delivered to Ukraine, potentially let small units of soldiers attack targets miles away from where they are launched. 

Both Russia and Ukraine have already supplemented their use of military drones with hobbyist and commercial drone models. As the supply of drones built for war dwindles with continued fighting, over the course of the war, experts expect an increased military reliance on commercial models, provided those drones are still available for purchase. 

“Let’s say Russians exaggerated everything …. In modern combat, they would still need to come up with that capability right away or yesterday, because that’s how wars are fought,”  Bendett said. Drones have “become organic to warfare.”

And even if the Russians didn’t have the same drone capability “that they bragged about,” he said, “they will need to acquire drones somewhere and put them out there.”

For other stories in the series, navigate here.

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Last week, on Wednesday, March 16, President Joe Biden announced that the United States would send $800 million worth of military assistance to Ukraine to aid the country as it fights a defensive war against Russia’s invading military. Among the anti-tank, anti-aircraft, and anti-personnel weapons included in the aid package was a line entry for “100 Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems.” Later that day, those systems were confirmed to be Switchblade drones, a kind of piloted missile that can also be a scout.

The US aid package also includes 20 million rounds of ammunition, grenades, and mortar rounds, as well as the 25,000 sets of body armor with matching helmets.

As for those 100 Switchblades, here’s everything to know about these drone-like missiles.

How does a Switchblade work?

The Switchblade is a flying camera robot with an explosive inside. These all-electric machines are weapons that will help find or attack nearby enemies, not far-away ones. 

Switchblades come in two sizes: the Switchblade 300 and Switchblade 600. Both can be carried by one person, though the weight difference is substantial—a 300 weighs just 5.5 pounds and can fit inside a backpack. The 600 is heavier, with the missile itself weighing 33 lbs and the components needed to transport it much heavier.

The Switchblade 300 can hit targets at a range of just over 6 miles, and can fly for a total of 15 minutes. The 600 has a range of 25 miles or a flight time of 40 minutes. The Switchblade contains cameras, and video from these sensors, as well as GPS information and image processing, is used to guide the Switchblade. The Switchblade is also designed to receive targeting information from other drones, allowing it to follow and find selected targets. That makes it one weapon among many that can be directed against a target with the targeting information provided by other drones.

What kind of targets will a Switchblade be used against?

Unlike other drones that are just used for reconnaissance, the Switchblade 300 carries a small explosive payload, the kind most likely used to hit people or unprotected weapons, like a mortar launcher or exposed machine gun emplacement. For the larger Switchblade 600, the payload is an “anti-armor warhead,” making it useful against vehicles.

If the humans directing the Switchblade see that it no longer has a target, it can be called off and then recovered. The brochure for the Switchblade 600 boasts that the weapon offers a rechargeable battery.

Are Switchblades drones or missiles?

The company that makes the Switchblade, AeroVironment, describes it as a “tactical missile system,” which hints at the weird dual-roles of the machine. It is both a flying scout and an armed weapon. Formally this category is called a “loitering munition.” 

While these seem like a highly modern creation, there’s historical context: The Kettering Bug, a 1918 uncrewed biplane that’s considered a predecessor to both drones and cruise missiles, flew for a time before an internal signal released its wings and it crashed its explosive payload into the ground. 

[Related: Ukraine’s answer to Russian tanks involves a classic tactic: metal ‘hedgehogs’]

Modern loitering munitions typically fly for some time, using sensors to look for targets such as anti-air missile sites and radar stations. Even at the full endurance of the Switchblade 600, the drone can only fly for 40 minutes, and the short duration of a Switchblade 300 is barely enough to qualify it as a loiterer.

When the missiles were first proposed and tested, they were commonly referred to as either “kamikaze drones” or “suicide missiles.” Popular Science, in its coverage a decade ago, referred to prototype Switchblades as a “Flying Assassin Robot” and a “Kamikaze Suicide Drones.” All of those names capture something important about the category: when one of these weapons blows up, it cannot be used again or recovered.

Is a Switchblade an autonomous weapon?

Like many drones, the Switchblade is directed by waypoint navigation, in which a human plots a path on a map and the robot, once launched, flies on its own accord.

“[Unlike] radio-controlled devices, the operator is not flying the aircraft, the operator’s simply indicating what he wants to look at, what he wants the camera to be pointing at, and the onboard computer flies the aircraft to that point and maintains on target,” Steve Gitlin, AeroVironment’s Chief Marketing Officer, told The War Zone in 2020. “We have a similar capability in our tactical unmanned aircraft systems. You could lock in on a target and the aircraft will basically maintain position on that target, autonomous.”

Other software on the Switchblade, like feature and object recognition, likely aids in its ability to find and track a target. That doesn’t make it an autonomous weapon in the strictest definition, but it is a weapon with autonomous features, which can change the ways people use them.

Focusing on whether or not it fits a strict definition of autonomous weapon is less important than understanding how, exactly, Switchblades use what autonomous features they have. “It’s therefore probably wisest to put the definitional debates aside and instead focus on the novel (as well as familiar) challenges and risks that are raised by the growing autonomy of weapon systems,” recently tweeted Arthur Holland Michel, a scholar of drones and autonomous war machines. “For example: Do the operators have sufficient situational awareness to make a decision on the use of force? Do the weapons provide a sufficient control surface for human operators to exercise precaution in attack?”

In battle, the short flight time between launch and impact for Switchblades, especially Switchblade 300s, means that the person firing the weapon is operating in a similar manner as someone firing an anti-air missile at a plane, with trust that the missile’s own targeting system will hit what it is supposed to hit. 

What is different for the Switchblade, compared to other missiles, is that the human operator has the possibility of calling off the attack if something changes, like a civilian walking into the area or the cameras revealing what the operator thought was a tank to be a schoolbus instead. That’s different from something like a high-flying Reaper drone, which fires missiles that can’t be turned around.

The ability to exercise that kind of control, to in effect un-fire a missile already airborne, is one of the big promises of control systems like this for weapons. For that promise to be realized, it requires that a human, launching weapons in battle, is able and willing to watch the missile’s own video feed until it ends.

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Craig Nazareth is an assistant professor of Practice of Intelligence & Information Operations, University of Arizona. This story originally published on The Conversation.

The US has been warning for weeks about the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine, and threatening retaliation if it does. Just eight years after Russia’s incursion into eastern Ukraine and invasion of Crimea, Russian forces are once again mobilizing along Ukraine’s borders.

As the US and other NATO member governments monitor Russia’s activities and determine appropriate policy responses, the timely intelligence they rely on no longer comes solely from multimillion-dollar spy satellites and spies on the ground.

Social media, big data, smartphones and low-cost satellites have taken center stage, and scraping Twitter has become as important as anything else in the intelligence analyst toolkit. These technologies have also allowed news organizations and armchair sleuths to follow the action and contribute analysis.

Governments still carry out sensitive intelligence-gathering operations with the help of extensive resources like the US intelligence budget. But massive amounts of valuable information are publicly available, and not all of it is collected by governments. Satellites and drones are much cheaper than they were even a decade ago, allowing private companies to operate them, and nearly everyone has a smartphone with advanced photo and video capabilities.

As an intelligence and information operations scholar, I study how technology is producing massive amounts of intelligence data and helping sift out the valuable information.

Open-source intelligence

Through information captured by commercial companies and individuals, the realities of Russia’s military posturing are accessible to anyone via internet search or news feed. Commercial imaging companies are posting up-to-the-minute, geographically precise images of Russia’s military forces. Several news agencies are regularly monitoring and reporting on the situation. TikTok users are posting video of Russian military equipment on rail cars allegedly on their way to augment forces already in position around Ukraine. And internet sleuths are tracking this flow of information.

This democratization of intelligence collection in most cases is a boon for intelligence professionals. Government analysts are filling the need for intelligence assessments using information sourced from across the internet instead of primarily relying on classified systems or expensive sensors high in the sky or arrayed on the planet.

However, sifting through terabytes of publicly available data for relevant information is difficult. Knowing that much of the data could be intentionally manipulated to deceive complicates the task.

Enter the practice of open-source intelligence. The U.S. director of national intelligence defines Open-Source Intelligence, or OSINT, as the collection, evaluation and analysis of publicly available information. The information sources include news reports, social media posts, YouTube videos and satellite imagery from commercial satellite operators.

OSINT communities and government agencies have developed best practices for OSINT, and there are numerous free tools. Analysts can use the tools to develop network charts of, for example, criminal organizations by scouring publicly available financial records for criminal activity.

Private investigators are using OSINT methods to support law enforcement, corporate and government needs. Armchair sleuths have used OSINT to expose corruption and criminal activity to authorities. In short, the majority of intelligence needs can be met through OSINT.

Machine learning for intelligence

Even with OSINT best practices and tools, OSINT contributes to the information overload intelligence analysts have to contend with. The intelligence analyst is typically in a reactive mode trying to make sense of a constant stream of ambiguous raw data and information.

Machine learning, a set of techniques that allows computers to identify patterns in large amounts of data, is proving invaluable for processing OSINT information, particularly photos and videos. Computers are much faster at sifting through large datasets, so adopting machine learning tools and techniques to optimize the OSINT process is a necessity.

Identifying patterns makes it possible for computers to evaluate information for deception and credibility and predict future trends. For example, machine learning can be used to help determine whether information was produced by a human or by a bot or other computer program and whether a piece of data is authentic or fraudulent.

And while machine learning is by no means a crystal ball, it can be used—if it’s trained with the right data and has enough current information—to assess the probabilities of certain outcomes. No one is going to be able to use the combination of OSINT and machine learning to read Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind, but the tools could help analysts assess how, for example, a Russian invasion of Ukraine might play out.

Technology has produced a flood of intelligence data, but technology is also making it easier to extract meaningful information from the data to help human intelligence analysts put together the big picture.

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This story originally featured on Popular Photography.

This Sunday, the Los Angeles Rams will face the Cincinnati Bengals at the NFL’s Super Bowl LVI. While that’s great news for the sportsball crowd, if you’re a drone pilot who enjoys flying around Los Angeles it will also leave you grounded for the next few days.

Fail to comply with the Super Bowl-specific rules and you could be in for an uncomfortable conversation with your bank manager and quite possibly your lawyer as well. Although ignorance of the rules wouldn’t be a viable defense, the Federal Aviation Administration has nevertheless taken to social media to warn pilots of the restrictions which will be in place over the weekend.

The FAA’s message to the public couldn’t be much more direct: Fly within 30 miles of SoFi Stadium and not only will you lose your drone, you’ll also face civil fines starting at $30,000. And that could prove to be the least of your worries, as there’s also the potential for criminal prosecution.

It’s pretty common for the FAA to put restrictions like these around major sporting events for public safety reasons, and an FAA representative tells DroneLife that both previous Super Bowls had similar 30-mile exclusion zones. The area covered by Sunday’s restriction is certainly vast though, in part because of the proximity of nearby Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). In all, an area some 60 miles across and stretching from ground level up to an altitude of almost 18,000 feet will be affected.

Prior to COVID, LAX was the world’s third-largest airport by passenger traffic, and even now it’s still in the top five busiest passenger airports in the USA. SoFi Stadium sits almost directly under the approach path and just 3.5 miles from LAX’s runway 24L, and commercial traffic to the airport will be continuing as normal. Even before Super Bowl LVI kicks off, drones are already interfering with LA’s traffic semi-regularly, including a recent incident in which a drone came within 700 feet of a passenger airliner. 

And on top of all that, the event will also be causing air traffic of its own. There’s a flyover scheduled by the Air Force Heritage Flight and at least two blimps will also be in the vicinity. The Air Force may also have fighter jets nearby to help enforce the no-fly zones. Add in numerous helicopters—not only shuttling VIPs back and forth or providing aerial photography, but also Customs and Border Patrol Blackhawks—and it’s clear LA’s skies are in for a busy weekend even without the drones. 

Drone pilots in the LA area should plan to sit out any flying this weekend if they want to be completely safe. If you really must reach for that drone, though, be sure to carefully check your plans first.

You can find detailed information on airspace restrictions aimed at drone pilots by using either the B4UFly apps for Android or iOS, or the web version of the map which you can find here. You’ll also find more information in the official Notice to Air Missions documents located here.

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To destroy drones in flight, Israel plans to deploy airborne lasers. A new system, which will mount high-powered laser weapons on airplanes, is part of a broader technological effort to create defensive systems so comprehensive that they can mitigate a range of low-cost weapons launched against the country, without costing a fortune to use.

In a speech at a think tank in Tel Aviv on February 1, Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced plans to defend the country with a “laser wall.”

“This will allow us, in the medium- to long-term, to surround Israel with a laser wall that will defend us from missiles, rockets, UAVs and other threats that will essentially take away the strongest card our enemies have against us,” Bennett said, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Bennett’s plans call for this system to be ready and in use by 2023. 

Last summer, Israeli defense giant Elbit released a video showing a laser system mounted on a small plane destroying a drone flying over a body of water. The plane was a modified Cessna Grand Caravan, a versatile commercial aircraft that is often used as a transport for small groups of people. As seen in the video, the laser is operated by an onboard crew of three.

[Related: Navy SEALs could get new airborne backup]

The operators found the drone, and then focused the laser on a small section of the drone’s hull. After a few seconds, the laser burned through the casing and inner workings of the drone, and the robot crashed apart above the sea. The premise, as outlined by Oren Sabag of Elbit Systems, is to destroy incoming threats before they reach population centers.

Israel’s government has publicly expressed concerns that drones, launched from groups inside Syria and reportedly supplied by Iran, will regularly be used like guided missiles against the country. The Houthis, one of several factions in Yemen’s ongoing civil war, have received foreign-built drones and deployed them against targets in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Low-cost drones offer range and accuracy previously unavailable to insurgents and armed groups without access to airplanes, letting those groups claim retaliatory strikes on builds far from the direct fighting.

In this way, drones can be seen as filling a similar role to the Qasem rockets, a cheap and rudimentary weapon that became a mainstay of attacks against Israel in the 2000s. These rockets, which lack guidance systems, are the primary target of Israel’s defensive Iron Dome system, an extensive array of radars, sensors, and missile batteries used to intercept rockets in flight.

The Iron Dome is effective at reducing the total number of rockets that explode, though like any defensive weapon system it can be overwhelmed by numbers and fail to intercept every attack. It is also expensive, with the dollar cost of each fired interceptor orders of magnitude pricier than the intercepted rocket, to say nothing of the actual development of the system itself. 

In the demonstrations of the new system last summer, the laser weapon destroyed drones at a distance of 1 km, or 0.6 miles. The goal is for the system to ultimately have a range of 12 miles, using a 100-kilowatt laser to quickly burn through any drone, missile, or rocket it detects. Nations like the United States have similarly invested in laser systems mounted on ships to protect vessels at sea from attack.

Defending an entire nation from incoming drones, rockets, and missiles is a much steeper task than putting a defensive system on a single ship. While “laser wall” implies fixed and permanent defenses, this system would be made up of flights of aircraft equipped with lasers. The system is being promised on a cost analysis that holds each laser usage as cheaper than the drone, rocket, or missile that the laser destroys. That may be possible, but it’s also generally expensive to keep aircraft constantly patrolling. 

[Related: The US Navy is testing out drone-zapping laser weapons]

What systems like the laser interceptor will do, and what the Iron Dome presently allows, is a way to mitigate many of the kinds of attacks that could be made against the country. Weapons, while largely seen from acquisition to use as apolitical tools, exist in a specific context, and change how leaders and governments understand the risk of certain actions. 

Like any defensive weapon, the “laser wall” cannot alone alter the politics that made its development prudent, nor can it promise indefinite security. Offense and defense is a kind of dialogue, and over time attackers can engineer or plan attacks that bypass known defenses. And in a larger context, on the same day that Bennett announced the “laser wall,” international human rights organization Amnesty International published a report declaring that “Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.”

As a technology that can mitigate the risks of asymmetric attack, the “laser wall” appears to have a basis in sound engineering and practical testing. If deployment follows, it will likely add a deeper layer of interception in the face of future attacks, and in so doing, will likely save some lives of people who would otherwise die in rocket or drone launches.

Watch Elbit’s video of the interception below:

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February has already been a big month for autonomous flight. For the first time, this past Saturday, and then again on Monday, a specially equipped Black Hawk helicopter flew without a single human on board. The computer-piloted aircraft was being tested as part of a DARPA program called Alias, and the tests took place out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

The retrofitted whirlybird was controlled by a Sikorsky-made autonomy system. As part of that system, the helicopter has a switch on board that allows the aviators to indicate whether two pilots, one pilot, or zero pilots will be operating the chopper. This was the first time that a Black Hawk was sent into the air with the no-pilots option, so that the computer system was handling all the controls. While these were just test flights, they hint at a future in which the Army could potentially send an autonomous helicopter on a dangerous rescue mission—and have no one on board it at all. 

The first test occurred on February 5. “The pilots shifted the knob to zero, and we did our first uninhabited flight,” said Stuart Young, the program manager for Alias at DARPA, during a press briefing on Tuesday. “We did some simple forward flight, and some pedal turns, and then landed.” 

That short flight was followed by another approximately 30-minute one the same day. On the longer flight, Igor Cherepinsky, the director of Sikorsky Innovations, noted that the helicopter was given simulated sensor data. (Sikorsky produces the Black Hawk helicopters, which are also known as UH-60s.) While the Black Hawk was physically in Kentucky, as part of the mission, it acted as if it was dodging structures in Manhattan, thanks to that simulated sensor data, Cherepinsky said. “And the aircraft was avoiding essentially [what it thought was] buildings in real time.” He added that having a helicopter with this capability could come in handy in urban environments, both in a military and civilian context. 

[Related: The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery]

Cherepinsky also noted that the uncrewed Black Hawk flew at around 4,000 feet of altitude and at speeds of about 115 to 125 miles per hour. Another brief autonomous flight occurred on Monday with the same aircraft.

In general, this kind of autonomy technology has three main goals, Young said. The first is safety, to ideally help prevent an aircraft from doing something disastrous like flying into terrain or a structure. The second is in-flight assistance so that the crew can focus on bigger-picture concerns, like the overall mission. “If you can remove some of the lower-level functions, we can allow the pilots to be unburdened,” Young said. And the third is cost reduction, either in personnel-training fees or even maintenance. 

[Related: Are Autonomous Helicopters The Next 18-Wheelers?]

The DARPA Alias program that this test was a part of has been ongoing for about six years; “Alias” is an acronym that stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. Sikorsky, meanwhile, has also been working on its autonomy technology for several years. The company has been operating a non-military test helicopter called SARA, or Sikorsky Autonomous Research Aircraft, which Popular Science caught a ride on—and even tried flying—in 2019. That helicopter was a testbed for this type of autonomous technology, and featured traditional controls, joystick-like controls called inceptors, and a tablet control system. 

“SARA is where we developed all of this,” Cherepinsky said. “The Black Hawk’s very similar to it.”

With these uncrewed flights now on the books, the DARPA program is in the process of winding down, Young said. “We’re actively working with the Army to transition the capabilities to the services.” He also said that the Air Force is interested in this type of software for its F-16 fighter jets. 

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Owning and flying a drone used to be a commitment all on its own. For one, you have to make peace with the fact that you’ll be lugging around a massive case when you want to take aerial shots. And when you have to store it at home, you also have to find a storage area big enough to house a quadcopter. Having one in your possession can be quite a chore, especially if you’re merely a hobbyist.

But that changed when foldable drones entered the market. These drones work just as great as their standard counterparts, but they can be collapsed to be more portable. The Vivitar VTI Phoenix Foldable Camera Drone is a great example, and for a limited time, you can grab it on sale for 36 percent off.

This foldable camera drone has a ‘follow me’ function, meaning it’s capable of following you or another object and shooting continuous footage of the subject without the need for manual control. It features GPS location locking, allowing it to recognize and maintain its position at a particular location. More importantly, it comes equipped with a 2048x1152p video resolution camera with 180 degrees articulated view, resulting in crystal clear footage and high-quality photos.

All of the drone’s pieces come secured in the side-carrying case, which helps protect them from damage as well as keeps them neatly organized. This way, you’ll have no problem carrying it around to your adventures and assembling it together. Its two batteries allow for a combined flight time of over 32 minutes, and with a range of 2000 feet, you can explore the skies better than ever before. It also has three distinct speed modes, as well as one-button take-offs and landings.

It’s worth noting that this unit is refurbished, but it is listed with a grade “A,” so it’s pretty much good as new. Formerly retailing for $249, the Vivitar VTI Phoenix Foldable Camera Drone is on sale for $159.

Prices subject to change.

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This month, Russia announced that it had completed research on its experimental Marker robot combat vehicle. The machine, designed from the start as a testbed for future tools and technologies, was never designed for combat, but machines based on its features will be. In a Russian military modernizing and mobilizing for war, the Marker program was a bet placed on the future of Russian robotics, one in which the biggest dividends will be realized years from now.

Marker is an uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV), similar in form if not armament to a tank. And like a tank, it has a tracked platform, onto which a range of sensors and weapons can be added. These include a turret with machine guns and anti-tank missiles, as well as a case that can launch drones.

Built by Android Technologies for the Advanced Research Foundation, Russia’s DARPA analog, the Marker has been a showcase vehicle in demonstrations since at least 2019. In that 2019 demonstration, the Marker’s turret followed the movements of an infantry spotter’s rifle scope, suggesting a human could aim the vehicle’s weapon remotely. Even flashier, the Marker moved in formation alongside 15 smaller quadcopter drones. 

“We have completed the work on the Marker,” said Yevgeny Dudorov, head of Android technologies, according to recent reporting by state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. “As part of it, we have worked out a number of technologies, but most importantly, the technology of autonomous group interaction of ground-based robotic devices.” 

[Related: Meet the ‘Spy Stone,’ a Russian robot disguised as a rock]

The Marker, from the start, has been a tool to test and explore military operations in the safety of controlled field exercises. It’s a way to scope out what might be possible if everything aligns the right way on a future battlefield. 

“This is Russia’s most visible R&D project involving ground autonomy, swarm development, [ground robot and drone] teaming, and manned-unmanned teaming. Marker is also a test bed for military AI solutions such as machine vision, image recognition and natural language processing,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security.

In its support for wars in Syria and in eastern Ukraine, Russia has already fielded some new robots, but these have been in conventional use cases. Rather than introducing new combat formations, these robots have been a tool added to a bomb squadron, or a scout robot incorporated into normal reconnaissance duties. Marker, by testing systems like sensors or communications that can go on existing robots, may have led to improvements in how those robots work. 

The country’s Ministry of Defense has announced plans to test its existing Uran-9 combat robot, its Kungas family of combat and scout robots, and the in-development Soratnik and Shturm robot tanks. 

“The Russian Ministry of Defense is pursuing swarm and group development for its aerial, ground and maritime robotics systems,” says Bendett. “Integrating these uncrewed ground vehicles in a common operating environment with crewed weapons and systems is high on the Ministry’s agenda.”

[Related: An inside look at how one person can control a swarm of 130 robots]

By working with Marker, Russia has been able to explore how combat formations designed from the start to incorporate autonomous robots might work, and if those formations can augment existing forces. Better communications, scouting, and control tools, tested on the Marker, could let robots work in formation with crewed human vehicles, and this is a direction Russia has clearly indicated it wants to take its military robot design.

Since 2014, Russia has backed forces inside eastern Ukraine, and this winter, it appears to be mobilizing even more forces for a possible invasion of another part of the country. While Russian robots will likely feature in a modest role in any larger Ukraine/Russia war, the Marker will not be among those vehicles.

“It’s likely that Russia may utilize Uran-6 demining UGVs, as well as Scarab and Sphera small scouting robots tested by Russian sappers in Syria in demining operations,” says Bendett. “While the Russian military tested different combat UGV types during recent exercises such as Zapad-2021, it’s unlikely they could be used in a significant capacity in Ukraine.”

While Marker-influenced ground robots may fight in future wars, it’s the flying Russian robots that are likely to see action in any conflict in 2022.

“At the same time, numerous UAVs may be used by the Russian military in Ukraine, such as multiple short-to-mid range surveillance and reconnaissance models used extensively in Syria,” says Bendett.  

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We’re living in a “pics or it didn’t happen” world. If you failed to capture a specific moment, did it even occur in the first place? And sure, it’s always a must to document your memories and adventures for later viewing, but why stop at pictures?

Capture 2022 in an entirely different way by scoring adventure cameras and drones that let you take your photography and videography to new heights. Here are 10 options to choose from, all of which are on sale for a limited time:

FITT360: Hands-Free Neckband Camera

Dubbed as the world’s first neckband type wearable 360-degree camera, the FITT360 is a device that you wear around your neck for hands-free and hassle-free recording. It uses three FHD cameras to capture everything around you and connects directly to the app to stitch the recorded footage into a 360-degree format. It usually retails for $599, but you can get it on sale for $489.99.

HD Digital Camera Binoculars

With a clear field of vision, 12x magnification, and precise focus adjustment, this camcorder and telescope hybrid is ideal for capturing even the most minute of details. Waterproof, anti-fog, anti-dust, and anti-shock, you can use it for hunting, bird watching, hiking, or taking photographs of wildlife, landscapes, travel, and more even in the harshest weather conditions. It normally goes for $199, but you can get it on sale for $129.95.

Global Drone 4K Platinum Version

This quadcopter pretty much ticks all of the boxes in what you’d want in a drone: 4K video capability, 360-degree roll and flip technology, and 3-level flight speed. It’s crafted out of high-strength and resistant-engineered plastics too, making it lightweight and durable. Originally $119, it’s on sale for $109.95.

Mini Helicopter UFO RC Drone

Designed to be kid-friendly, this mini helicopter has sensors on each side and at the bottom to protect it from collisions and built-in LED lights for maximized fun. It’s also built with a flexible barrier for added durability. Usually $50, you can grab it on sale for $21.95.

Dark Gray Eachine E58 4K HD Camera Flying Drone

Thanks to this drone’s headless mode, you no longer have to adjust the position of the aircraft before flying it. It’s also capable of finding its way back to you automatically with its one-key automatic return function. Of course, with its 4K/1080p wide-angle camera, you can capture the best images and videos with better highlights and shadows. Typically $225, you can score it on sale for $62.95.

Newest Gray E68 Drone 2 with 4K/1080P Wide-Angle Camera and WiFi

This drone comes with a remote control to help you navigate it from a higher distance. It’s equipped with a 4K HD camera for crystal-clear images, and an altitude hold mode that stabilizes the drone’s flight. It also has a partner app that allows you to view what you’re capturing on your smartphone in real-time. It usually retails for $320, but you can grab it on sale for $79.95.

EXO X7 Ranger 4K Dynamic Camera Drone

Boasting a 4.1 out of 5-star rating on Amazon, this drone equipped with a 4K video camera, with a 1/3 in-camera sensor, and a 3 axis gimbal is ideal for beginners. Its dual camera delivers a more dynamic range, brighter colors, and a soft look, while its 120 camera tilt lets you capture bird-eye shots and skyline shots. It formerly retailed for $327, but you can get it on sale for $277.99.

Black Drone with Dual HD 4K Camera

Armed with a 3-axis mechanical gimbal and electronic image stabilization, this 4K drone can capture steady photos and footage. With a control distance up to 1,200 meters, you can navigate it from a taller height or a longer distance via the accompanying remote control. It typically retails for $89, but you can grab it on sale for $74.95.

4K Action Pro Waterproof All Digital UHD WiFi Camera

Record all the fun parts of your adventures with this waterproof, shockproof, and dustproof camera that lets you view the live feed on your phone. It can record high-quality and stable video in stunning 4K resolution and has a built-in Gyro stabilizer and in-body sensor stabilization feature to get the perfect shot every time. It formerly retails for $149, but you can get it on sale for $49.99.

Alpha Z PRO 4K + Flying Fox 4K Wide Angle Dual Camera Drones Bundle

The only thing better than one drone is two drones. This deal nets you two quadcopters, both of which feature a 4K front camera, a 720p bottom camera, and a sleek design. Both drones are capable of not only capturing picturesque shots, but also executing all sorts of moves and tricks. Buying them separately would set you back $398, but you can get both on sale for only $174.99.

Prices subject to change.

The post Record this year’s adventures with these drones & cameras on sale appeared first on Popular Science.

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Last November, at Fort Campbell, Tennessee, half a mile from the Kentucky border, a single human directed a swarm of 130 robots. The swarm, including uncrewed planes, quadcopters, and ground vehicles, scouted the mock buildings of the Cassidy Range Complex, creating and sharing information visible not just to the human operator but to other people on the same network. The exercise was part of DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program.

If the experiment can be replicated outside the controlled settings of a test environment, it suggests that managing swarms in war could be as easy as point and click for operators in the field.

“The operator of our swarm really was interacting with things as a collective, not as individuals,” says Shane Clark, of Raytheon BBN, who was the company’s main lead for OFFSET. “We had done the work to establish the sort of baseline levels of autonomy to really support those many-to-one interactions in a natural way.”

Piloting even one drone can be so taxing that it’s not rare to see videos of first-time flights leading immediately to crashes. Getting to the point where a single human can control more than a hundred drones takes some skill—and a lot of artificial intelligence.

In total, the swarm operator directed 130 vehicles in the physical world, as well as 30 simulated drones operating in the virtual environment. These 30 virtual drones were integrated into the swarm’s planning and appeared as indistinguishable from the others in the program to the human operator, and to the rest of the swarm. As apparitions of pure code, tracked by the swarm AI, these virtual drones flew in formation with the physical drones, and maneuvered around as though they really existed in physical space.

How a human commanded the swarm

For the person directing the swarm, the entire array of robots appeared as a virtual reality strategy game, mapped onto the real world. 

Wearing a Microsoft VR headset, the operator interacted “with this 3D VR interface that has what’s called a sand-table view,” says Clark. “It can be very similar to the sort of God’s Eye, real-time strategy game view, where they see all the platforms laid out over a 3D map of the environment. When something is detected, they’ll get an icon geolocated to the space. So if one of the platforms detected a hazard right outside of the building, they’d see a red flashing icon appear in space where that belongs.”

With the headset on, the operator was able to assign the swarm missions and see what the swarm had already scouted, but they was not giving direct orders to individual drones. The swarm AI, receiving orders and processing sensor information, was the intermediary between human control and the movement of robots in physical space.

At present, when a squad wants to use a drone to scout an area, it takes a dedicated pilot controlling it by tablet to see and direct the robot. The new approach has drawbacks and advantages: Because the operator’s VR headset blocks out the surrounding world, the human operator is vulnerable and oblivious to their immediate surroundings, except as they are displayed inside the headset. At the same time, the human operator is directing the actions of dozens of robots, shifting the one-to-one pilot-to-drone ratio drastically. Provided the human swarm operator can stay safe and the network can stay functional, the drones can capture useful information and relay it to nearby soldiers in the field. The new technology allows for a tremendous shift in what can be known about a battlefield in real time.

How the swarm operated

The physical drone models included custom drone planes made by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. In the swarm, their role was primarily passing over the entire training area and initial mapping, though the swarm also directed them to provide camera coverage as needed. On the ground were small wheeled robots made by Aion Robotics. In between were four different types of quadcopters, including 75 3DR Solo drones, light-show drone models from UVify, and two sizes of quadcopter by ModalAI.

[Related: These augmented-reality goggles let soldiers see through vehicle walls]

All of the robots involved were either commercial models or custom models built from commercial, off-the-shelf parts. This was not a swarm built to military specifications—these were commercial, hobbyist, and custom-built machines working together through dedicated software. That keeps the cost of the swarm down to about $2,000 for each robot in it.

These six types of robots reported telemetry information to each other, letting the swarm know where each part of the whole was in space. That shared information let the swarm collaborate on flight paths in real time, moving pieces into place as needed while avoiding collision. 

“We work hard to do some processing [of sensor readings] on platforms, so we don’t need to send a lot back on the network,” says Clark. “So we never send back a raw picture. We send back, ‘ah this picture is a door’ or ‘this picture is a hazard’ or ‘a source of intel.’ That processing happens on board. We just send back a notification.”

[Related: Why the Air Force wants to put lidar on robot dogs]

Automated processing makes swarm interactions possible. It can also, depending on the nature of what is processed, come with a significant risk of error.

Each of the robots was equipped with a little LTE modem, and to ensure the robots were communicating with each other and the human operator, the team set up an LTE cell tower, like the kind that regularly processes cell phone signals. This let the swarm share location to Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK), a program that runs on phones and lets soldiers in the field receive and send battle-relevant information.

“During the field exercise, as a matter of convenience, we had safety spotters out on the range looking for unsafe conditions or flyaways, and all of their phones were receiving all of the swarm traffic and their phone would vibrate and warn them if something got too close to them, because it’s too hard to track all of them in the air at the same time,” says Clark.

By only filtering the proximate drone location to people in the field, the swarm shared only what the observers needed to immediately know. In a real-life scenario, with swarms moving in support of battle, soldiers will at most need to know if a nearby drone is friendly, and won’t want to spend a lot of time sorting out where exactly the rest of the swarm is.

As the Pentagon expects future battles to take place in massive urban environments, getting more situational awareness could mean the difference between squad survival and ambush.

Watch a video from the human swarm operator’s perspective below:

The post An inside look at how one person can control a swarm of 130 robots appeared first on Popular Science.

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Earlier this month, General Atomics announced that its latest drone in the Predator family would be named Mojave. Part of a lineage that includes the Reaper and Gray Eagle, the Mojave is billed as a flying arsenal that is also made for rougher and more rugged environments than its predecessors.

What sets the Mojave apart, specifically, is that it’s designed outright as a short takeoff and landing plane, expanding the kinds of terrain it can operate from.

“We are providing the ground force with a long-endurance, armed overwatch UAS [unmanned aerial system] that can quickly reload weapons at austere sites, located close to the conflict zone,” General Atomics aeronautical systems CEO Linden Blue said in a release. 

The Mojave comes 14 years after the Reaper entered service, and 27 years after the Predator first flew in 1994. (The Gray Eagle, flown by the Army, entered service in 2009, and operates as a better-armed Predator that works well alongside other Army vehicles). These drones, as a family, are hardly new machines—but it has been a long time since a new iteration on the design joined the military.

The Predator started life as an unarmed scout before it added the ability to launch weapons, but it was the dedicated Reaper, built to operate from those long runways with a full load of missiles that really defined the use of drones in the long War on Terror.

[Related: Watch a C-130 cargo plane grab a drone out of the sky]

“Air Force’s hunter-killer UAV now flying in Afghanistan,” is how the Air Force announced the use of Reapers in that country in May 2007. At the time, and for years afterwards, the US Air Force operated from bases across Afghanistan and Iraq, with combined miles and miles of runway. 

This hunter-killer role is central to modern drones, and it is prominent in a request for information made by the Air Force last April. In this solicitation, the Air Force sought new sensors for Reapers and future drones.

“The Hunter-Killer mission set provides a unique capability of combined ISR and Strike attributes in a single platform fulfilling the highest demand of all Air Force assets through vast capacity,” reads the request. “As a critical component of the current MQ-9 weapon system, the [Electrooptical/Infrared] sensor’s capabilities are integral to the combined ISR and Strike mission.”

The rest of the request deals largely with the specifics of putting a new camera on a drone. Nestled in that request, as reported by The War Zone, is the desire that this new drone be “attritable or expendable, unlike the Reaper, as well as, or as an alternative to being survivable and reusable.”

It will also, as the launch announcement for the Mojave clearly states, be built for more dynamic war than the Reaper was, where bases are maintained for weeks rather than years as front lines shift. A short takeoff and landing (STOL) ability expands the number of airfields that a drone can fly from, and is a feature sought after when the drone still needs to fly even if traditional runways cannot be built or seized in time. A STOL drone could even possibly use rough roads and clearings.

The Mojave’s wingspan and length are both shorter than the Reaper’s, though its total payload capacity is reduced by only about 250 pounds. With only cameras, the Mojave can take off from a 400-foot runway, and even with a load of 12 hellfires (75 percent of its total capacity), it can still take off from just 1,000 feet. Reapers require at least 3,000 feet of runway, with an extra 1,000 foot margin of error on each side of that, limiting the drones to operation from runways nearly a mile long. 

[Related: Poland’s new anti-aircraft system will hit stealth targets at supersonic speeds]

Endurance for the Mojave is listed at over 25 hours, which is close to the 27 hours of the Reaper maximum endurance, though it is not immediately clear how much the Mojave’s endurance is shortened when it carries its full loadout into action.

One use case, suggested in technical terms in the brochure for the Mojave, is transport near where it’s needed inside a C-130 cargo plane. With four people assembling, arming, and operating the drone, it could be airborne 90 minutes after it’s been unloaded from a C-130, and could then fly and fight for 8 hours with no weapons, or 3 hours with 12 hellfires on board.

It is still early in the Mojave’s development. What is clear from its design is that future drone wars will be fought from rougher airfields, and may need the flexibility of a smaller plane that can be a useful scout, a long-flying sentry, or a short-duration attack plane.

Most crucially, Mojaves are designed to fight alongside Reapers, using many of the same sensors and weapons. This is not a Reaper replacement—it’s a complimentary weapon, built to hunt and kill at the command of human operators. 

Watch a video of the Mojave below:

The post Mojave, the new Predator drone, is built to navigate rugged terrain appeared first on Popular Science.

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A sustained flash of light produces fire, and then wreckage. This month, the US Navy continued its tests of a laser weapon from the deck of the USS Portland, destroying a target floating on the surface of the Gulf of Aden. These laser demonstrations are part of a broader modernization effort, with the US Navy trying out new and varied tools in the waters around the Middle East. 

The test took place on December 14. It was preceded by tests in the Pacific in May 2020, in which the Portland used the same laser weapon to destroy a target drone. Both demonstrations are part of the Navy figuring out how, exactly, its larger ships can protect themselves from smaller, cheaper threats.

To better understand modern directed-energy weapons, it’s important to take a step back from the science-fiction idea of a laser weapon. High-powered beams of light are expensive to develop and deploy, but they offer a kind of cost-savings once they are up and running. Provided a ship can generate the electrical power needed, a laser is, shot for shot or threat for threat, a cheaper mechanism than anti-air missiles or potentially even .50 caliber bullets for destroying incoming attacks.

If the threats the Navy wants to defeat are cheap, such as Qasef-1 drones, then what the Navy needs to deploy is a countermeasure that’s also cheap to use.

Drones, especially loitering munitions that fly like drones but attack like missiles, are a durable and increasing threat in modern warfare. Some of the groups fighting in Yemen have used expendable drones as missiles in far-reaching attacks, and plenty of modern anti-air defenses, like anti-plane missiles, are at best cost-ineffective against drones, and sometimes even unable to detect and intercept drone attacks.

[Related: The US Navy is testing autonomous seafaring robots that patrol the ocean]

A laser does not solve the detection part of the threat, but it does give commanders a cheaper alternative than shooting a missile at a drone. If the laser can burn through an attacking drone quickly enough, it can then be turned to face another target, and by expending only generated electric power, it can protect a ship from a host of attacks.

“You can do everything in the world to understand how you think laser weapons are going to be used, but you put this controller in the hands of a sailor who’s going to play with it and do the thing they do with the operational interface, and then they’re going to decide to use it in ways we can’t imagine,” Frank Peterkin, the Navy’s Senior Technologist for Directed Energy, told USNI News in 2019, after the selection of the USS Portland for the weapon was announced.

The USS Portland is an Amphibious Transport Dock, capable of landing 700 Marines by dedicated landing craft, as well as helicopters and V-22 Ospreys. It’s the kind of ship that will need to get close to danger, with a small set of ship-board weapons to ensure its survival to and beyond that point.

Putting a laser weapon on the Portland gives it extra options against any threats it may encounter, like drones, or attempts to attack it with small boats. The most infamous example of this threat occured in October 2000; while docked in Yemen’s Aden harbor, the destroyer USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers in a small boat. The attack killed both bombers and 17 sailors, and injured 37 other people on board the ship. 

[Related: America’s Laser Gun Goes To War]

When the US Navy tested a laser weapon in 2014, on the USS Ponce, it used it to destroy the engine of a small motorboat, the kind of use that could protect a ship from attackers using inexpensive means to try and stop a ship before it reaches shore. The Ponce’s laser was 30 kw. As designed, the laser on board the Portland is at 150 kw, letting it burn through targets faster and thus disable more threats to the ship.

This demonstration of the laser aboard the Portland follows a pattern of demonstrations of Navy robots in the Gulf of Aden and the Persian Gulf. Whatever danger the Navy anticipates in the future, it is now regularly exploring how new technology in the seas adjacent to the Arabian Peninsula can help it out.

Watch a video of the Portland firing its laser below:

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The sea is vast, and full of secrets, and the US Navy is in the business of knowing them. This fall, in both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the Navy experimented with new robotic boats. These machines, the Saildrone and MANTAS T-38 unmanned surface vessel, are forays into launching future flotillas of autonomous sensing machines, all of which promise to expand the scope of what the Navy can know about the waters it patrols.

The Saildrone Explorer looks like a windsurfer without a human clinging onto it. With a 23-foot-long body and standing at 16 feet tall, the Explorer is mostly sail. It draws electrical power from the sun and propulsive power from the wind. Under sail power, the drone travels between 2 and 7 mph. These vehicles can sail for long distances and durations, with the company claiming that the drones can operate for up to 12 months on a mission before it needs to come ashore for maintenance. 

Saildrones can be outfitted with a range of sensors. The version of the robotic surfer that Popular Science selected for a 2021 Best of What’s New award was used by NOAA to track hurricane winds. The drones can carry sensors for wind speed and direction, for air temperature and humidity, for measuring the salinity and magnetic field of the ocean surface, and even for  detecting fish biomass and mammal presence under the surface. In addition, the Saildrones can record above-the-surface video and use machine learning algorithms to detect targets. This is one of the main features the Navy is interested in.

The cameras and processing on the Saildrone “deliver real-time, visual detection of targets that are otherwise not transmitting their position,” the company claims, which can then be paired with radar, acoustic sensors, and other detection systems to confirm a sighting.

In November, the Navy announced that it would base these Saildrones out of Jordan’s naval base in Aqaba, on the Red Sea.

[Related: Watch a team of robots launch and target a missile]

“We are working harder and smarter to achieve maritime security, in all domains – surface, subsurface, and over the sea,” Hisham Khaleel Aljarrah, commander of the Royal Jordanian Naval Force, said in a joint statement with the Navy. “The Red Sea will witness a significant increase in monitoring and power projection to maintain stability and security within international waters.”

Michael Brasseur, head of the Navy task force for robots and AI managing Saildrone, described in a statement the robots as leveraging “machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance maritime domain awareness,” which then extends “the digital horizon with a sustainable, zero carbon solution.

That’s a jargon-dense phrase. In practice, it means that having cameras and other sensors on the drones extends the area in which the Navy can know what is going on. With wind-driven propulsion and solar-powered electronics, the Saildrone suggests a lower impact operation, though it is too early to say if these robots are going to replace existing human-crewed vessels. Instead, the adoption of robot boats should be seen as expanding on existing naval operations, with little increase to impact.

Saildrone is one of several Silicon Valley products to be pursued by the Department of Defense this year. Lux Capital, the venture capital group that backed Saildrone, met with senior defense officials earlier this year. Lux boasts specifically of Saildrone as an alternative to more-expensive crewed vessels, highlighting an estimated $80,000/day operating cost for traditional scientific research. It’s hard to compare directly without a public operating cost per day figure for Saildrones, or how much operational capability is lost in the transfer from a human crewed vessel to a robotic one, but it’s worth noting that the Saildrone is being marketed on a low cost of use as well as the abilities of the machines.  

On the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy’s 5th fleet experimented with MANTAS robot boats. The individual vessels are named for their length (the T-12 is 12 feet long and the T-38 is 38 feet long). With both fully electric and diesel/electric hybrid options, the MANTAS robot catamarans are sensor platforms designed to discover danger and move quickly. The T12, which the Navy tested in October, has a burst speed of up to 34 mph, and the T-38, which the Navy tested this month, can go over 90 mph.

MANTAS can carry a range of sensors, from camera pods to hydroacoustic systems, allowing the vessels to look for objects and action in the sky, on the surface of the water, and under the sea. In the tests with the US Navy, the vessels mainly followed autonomous directions for monitoring. 

[Related: The US Navy launched a missile from a ghost ship. Wait, what?]

Between the Saildrone and the MANTAS, the Navy is clearly looking at ways to know more about the seas in which it operates, without committing to sending more sailors on patrol. Robots like these have the potential to be a force multiplier, expanding the scope of what can be known without committing additional labor. While uncrewed vessels may be more vulnerable if found by hostile forces, that vulnerability can actually be an asset. A sensor system that’s been disabled is a source of information in its own right, and the ability to learn of attacks without having to first suffer the loss of human life is a good thing.

It remains to be seen how these robots will be employed at sea. Monitoring for potential threats and mapping the underwater terrain are both likely early uses. It’s possible in the future that such machine assessments of danger could be directly integrated into targeting and firing controls of existing military vehicles, with the robots acting as spotters for more distantly-carried weapons on other vessels.

For now, investment in the boats show a commitment to understanding oceans as battlefields, ones patrolled on the furthest edge by robots.

Watch a video of the MANTAS T-12 here.

The post The US Navy is testing autonomous seafaring robots that patrol the ocean appeared first on Popular Science.

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In the plains of central Spain, just about 90 minutes south of Madrid, a firefighting robot is taking flight. With two engines, a smooth underbelly, and a construction straight out of World War II’s Atlantic theater, the Singular Aircraft Flyox is a drone designed as an aerial workhorse on land and water. It is one of a growing number of drones that may be called to fight forest fires as aerial tankers, augmenting or replacing crewed aircraft in the process.

The Flyox first flew in 2015, and is undergoing further test flights this fall and winter. The firefighting mission is one of its flashiest, and gets central placement in the company’s materials about the plane. Citing the death rates of human firefighters–specifically the risk from smoke inhalation–Singular Aircraft owner and founder Luis Carrillo says the main goal of the drone is to “stop killing agricultural and firefighting pilots.”

The risk fumes pose to a drone is just mechanical failure, rather than loss of life when human pilots are involved. For the firefighting role specifically, Singular Aircraft is exploring two sizes of Flyox drone. The smaller version will have an internal capacity of 3,400 pounds, with a two-hour flight time and a range of 260 miles. The larger drone, owing to its greater fuel capacity, will only carry 3,000 pounds internally, but can operate for four-and-a-half hours, and reach distances of over 500 miles.

[Related: This helpful tank-like robot fights fires, not people]

Carrillo says the Flyox operates autonomously with a human monitoring the flight. In demonstrations it has been assembled from a crate in a few hours, and then launched from a runway or from a calm river or lake. In addition to testing the Flyox in Spain, Singular Aircraft has conducted test flights at an experimental test airfield in Mexico and other locations around the world. Carrillo also hopes to test from a site that will allow three drones to operate simultaneously. 

Putting a drone like the Flyox into rotation for aerial firefighting could augment the work already done by human-crewed aircraft, bringing more water or fire retardant to bear against raging blazes. The same characteristics that make the drone useful as a firefighter lend the airframe to a host or other tasks, with Singular Aircraft marketing versions for surveillance, cargo transport, or even agricultural use.

A two-engined amphibious firefighting drone is an idea so good it’s being tried twice, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Aerial ScooperDrone, built by Drone America, is a long-in-the-works craft. The drone, billed primarily as a tool for disaster relief, has a built-in communications relay and comes with thermal cameras to look for people caught in floods or at sea. In its first-response role, the drone is built to carry and release self-inflating life rafts, allowing people in the water the opportunity to climb aboard and wait for slower rescuers without having to tread water.

“The origins and inspiration of the amphibious Ariel platform drone utilized to save and improve lives came from my own experience assisting with a water rescue back in 2002,” says Mike Richards, president and CEO of Drone America. “One of those situations where you understand that there is a need to provide a fast response for a drowning victim, providing a flotation aid such as a life vest.”

[Related: New kit turns drones into lifesavers]

The absence of a commercial craft able to meet such a need led him to develop the Aerial drone, says Richard, with a small prototype in 2008 and a larger one in 2012. The planned fire rescue version, built to carry roughly 1,000 gallons of water (or 8,500 pounds), was part of a 2018 collaboration with Thrush Aircraft, though after a change in ownership Thrush has shifted its focus to agricultural aircraft.

“Our strategy is one of early detection and fast attack on initial stage fires, utilizing multiple autonomous amphibious Ariels combined with swarm capable targeting and deployment systems,” says Richards. Because  the drone can refill its tank with water from lakes, and because it’s equipped with sensors to avoid collisions, Richards sees the Aerial ScooperDrone as a way to fight fires at night when it is unsafe for human-crewed aircraft to operate.

To move the design forward, Drone America is working on an application for an experimental airworthiness certificate with the US Federal Aviation Administration that would allow for additional testing of their existing prototypes. Drone America would then further test its models in real-world conditions.

“Our ultimate goal for the Ariel platform is to scale and deploy a certified full-size system to high fire risk areas throughout the world,” says Richards.

In the warming world of the future, where wildfires are likely to be a growing problem, allowing drones to fight blazes could save lives–not just of firefighters but of the people threatened by fires, too.

The post Flying, amphibious drones may help us fight wildfires in a warming world appeared first on Popular Science.

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With an open door and a gentle shove, the crate falls into the sky from a cargo transport. Once clear of the plane, the craft’s wings unfold, and the crate transforms from a falling box to a controlled glider. The cargo crate, aided by stable flight and directed navigation, lands miles and miles from where it was released, ready to resupply the soldiers who open it.

Resuppling forces in the field is a perpetual hardship facing militaries. To facilitate a new kind of air supply–and at greater distances than before–the Air Force announced an award of a contract for 15 “Precision Guided Cargo Delivery Drones,” from dronemaker Silent Arrow on November 29. 

This contract is, formally, “Guided Bundle Derivative of Silent Arrow for Side Door and Palletized Swarm Deployment at High Speeds and Altitudes,” with the drones themselves deemed Precision Guided Bundles. That’s a mess of a program name, but it tells a story in pieces. In 2019, Silent Arrow exhibited a large version of their cargo drone that could be released from the loading ramps of large transport planes.

[Related: Drones could help save soldiers’ lives by delivering blood on demand]

The new contract is for a similar style of vehicle, roughly one fourth the volume and just under half the length of their existing cargo drone. “Palletized Swarm Deployment” is about launching multiple of these drones at once, from the side and rear doors of cargo planes, so that the cargo can travel in several small bundles instead of one big package.

The Precision Guided Bundles will have a maximum weight of 500 pounds apiece, with capacity for 350 pounds of cargo inside, as set out in the new specifications. The drone bundles will be at most 39 inches long, or just a little over 3 feet, and they can be released from a cargo plane at high altitudes and speeds, though exactly what altitudes and speeds was not specified. 

What is most striking is the drone’s proposed range. Silent Arrow’s existing cargo glider drone can land 40 miles away from where it is launched. That’s the same distance that military parachutists can travel in high-altitude high-opening drops. (These are distinct from High Altitude Low Opening, or HALO, drops, where the plane has to be relatively close to the ultimate landing zone).

When soldiers and special forces jump from a plane at high altitude and distance, they can guide their parachutes to a landing zone miles and miles away. Putting guidance systems on the cargo that launches with the troops means when soldiers arrive, they can have some of what they need for a sustained fight or a longer mission. 

For years, the military has explored different technologies to bring meals, ammunition and other supplies on such long-distance jumps. In the 1990s, the Air Force and Army started developing the Joint Precision Airdrop System, which attached to cargo parachutes and could steer them by pulling guidelines and following GPS. That system first saw use in Afghanistan in 2006.

Silent Arrow offers a smaller payload than some of the parachute drops, but makes up for it by being able to launch from smaller aircraft. This specifically includes the Cessna Caravan, a single-engine light transport that serves as the basis for the AC-208 Combat Caravan, a military version used by Special Operations Command. The flexibility to launch from small planes gives the military the option to send discreet support that doesn’t involve  screaming jet engines.

[Related: Navy SEALs could get new airborne backup. Here’s what the planes look like.]

Food, medicine, and ammunition aren’t the flashiest of payloads, but they’re essential for anyone operating on the ground, far from regular supply routes. The ability to deliver cargo silently and in small, expendable packages can keep special forces operational for longer as they pursue the tasks of irregular warfare.

The cargo glider can also aid combat troops in static but difficult-to-reach positions, making a continued presence possible. And because cargo can be delivered at distance, it can more safely be used in situations where hostile anti-aircraft weapons would make closer delivery by crewed aircraft untenable.

The Air Force will test the 15 gilders under contract at the Pendleton test range in northeastern Oregon to make sure they perform as expected. 

Watch the existing Silent Arrow cargo glider fly below:

The post These gliding drones could deliver supplies from Air Force planes to the battlefield appeared first on Popular Science.

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Birds have mastered the art of landing on complex surfaces such as rough, textured tree branches. Now, a new robot developed by Stanford engineers has a useful set of bird-like features such as claws, toe pads, curving feet, and bending legs that allow it to land smoothly anywhere. 

The bot, a flying Frankenstein-type contraption, has four sets of propellers on top that fly it, and two legs underneath. The legs look similar to the legs on a bird you might see out the window, but are attached to a quadcopter.

The research, published in Science Robotics on Wednesday, details the development of the bot, which requires minimal computational power from its control board. This allows it to be incorporated in the future in other projects without demanding a lot of computational space, leaving room for other objectives like observation, recording, other movements, and more to be programmed in. The robotic bird-like legs can also be used to model the way avian legs move and function without needing to involve real birds. 

“We ended up designing this robot that can land like birds [do],” says David Lentink, a senior research engineer involved in the development, “and the way we got there was by first studying how birds actually accomplish landing on really complex surfaces.”

First, the team needed to create an initial prototype based on previous research in avian morphology. They consulted available texts and bird cadavers, and tried to get as much information as possible without having to use live birds. 

Lentink and the team went through many iterations of the robot legs in order to get the grasping effect onto surfaces like tree branches just right.They tested each iteration to see if it could land correctly by using another automated machine that would launch the bird bot at a tree the same way each time. If the legs could not grasp the surface, the robot would fall off the branch, and the team would readjust the features and try again until they got it right. 

[Related: LEO the robot can float like a butterfly and balance on a beam]

Early versions of the robot had legs that focused on shock absorption instead of mimicking avian characteristics, but as these versions failed to grasp the branch they were thrown at, the structures on the robot eventually evolved (through the researchers’ work) to become more bird-like. The team changed the design from one leg to two as trials showed that having both helped balance the robot on asymmetrical surfaces. They also swapped the flat rubber pads on the robot foot for a more wavy, rough-surfaced, but still squishy design (rubber proved too slippery to grasp the branches). They replaced engineered hooks with 3D-printed claw-like structures, as the hooks’ sharpness actually hindered performance. 

“There’s this whole mechanics of being able to grasp a complex surface of which you have no idea what it looks like,” says Lentink.

Besides features, the team had to get the actual motion of the leg just right. The final feet of the bird bot can bend at two joints, which enables it to grasp a branch by bending at the first joint before the second, like bending your wrist and then fingers to grab something. The legs also bend upon contact with the branch to absorb the shock, which in turn creates tension for the feet and toes to curl around the branch. These features allow the bot to adapt upon contact to whatever surface it interacts with.

“Finally, when we got the balance right as well,” says Lentink, “we could reliably and repeatedly perch on really complex surfaces.”

Despite undergoing 190 trials of being tossed, the bird bot saw little wear to its structural integrity, and continued to grasp the branches. Not only could the bot repeatedly do this, but it did so without much computation from the bot’s controls. Because the legs are adaptable enough to land the robot, there was no need for artificial intelligence. Lentink explained that this leaves room for flight, observation, and other motions to be programmed into the landing features if they were to be added to more complex machines in the future.

The bird-legged bot also opens up possibilities for an adaptable landing gear that can lessen the need for landing strips and helicopter pads. Other small drones can only fly for so long, but with legs like these, this tech opens the door for drones to perch while they observe, reducing their overall power use.

“If we put on our bird goggles,” says Lentink, “and we look at what the world looks like, we can land everywhere.”

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On its platform, the helicopter-style SH-350 drone receives a blue package in a pelican-case-style box. Tied tight into place, it rises with the drone over a field of snow. The tops of snow-covered trees are visible below, as the robotic letter carrier navigates the skies of the Siberian winter twilight. On delivery, a human opens the protecting case, and extracts the contents.

Drone delivery offers a chance to overcome the innate difficulties of regular resupply over difficult terrain, offering lessons for civilian and military logistics alike. In a release, the country’s postal service, the Russian Post, said it expects the use of drones along such routes to double the speed of delivery, increase the volume of freight traffic by 10, and at the same time reduce the cost of such logistics by half.

The 32-mile flight took place between the towns of Salekhard and Aksarka in northern Russia, with the Aeromax-made SH-350 drone covering the distance in about half the time it would take for a car to drive between the two. That’s assuming the roads have clear conditions, and are free of any of the hazards that come with winter. While the weather may not always be right for a drone to fly, a storm needs only to stop storming before a drone can take off. A road may need anything from clearing to repair before it can be used again.

“We currently develop drone deliveries to remote and inaccessible areas so that locals can quickly get any postal dispatching,” Aeromax deputy Director Sergei Sergushev told The Barents Observer.

These SH-350 drones have a speed of up to 55 mph, a range of 93 miles, and a total cargo capacity of 220 pounds. The Russian Post sees these drones as a way to ensure sustained delivery, despite adverse conditions, with 10 routes in the Yamal region planned by 2024. 

[Related: Drones could help save soldiers’ lives by delivering blood on demand]

“The drone is tested in the most challenging environment in Russia. The country has vast territory, severe climate and sparsely-populated regions – putting down additional infrastructure like roads, highways and rail could be very expensive or even cost-prohibitive,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “Flying piloted aircraft like planes and helicopters could be expensive and dangerous – therefore, using a UAV is a perfect technical solution. Not much infrastructure is needed for this drone.”

If the drone proves as useful at mail delivery as promised, it could be tested in other, similarly remote regions. Building an alternative infrastructure for logistics, one that does not rely on roads, can increase capacity in normal times and create sustained links after storms or disaster. It’s a way of ensuring the post still goes through, even when nothing else can. The cargo capacity of a single trip may be modest, but it’s enough for medicine or food or other vital supplies, and stretched over many trips makes such remote connections possible.

“Recently, the Russian government decided to include Uncrewed Air Systems into a common airspace with piloted aircraft,” says Bendett. “The country and population are expecting rapid growth of drones in different industries like transportation, logistics, construction, agriculture, extractive industries, and many others.”

[Related: Russia wants to launch little drones off of other drones off of ships]

Using drones for the logistics and mail runs means that if disaster strikes, from a sudden storm to persistent high winds, no lives are lost when the drone crashes. This idea is part of what has made cargo drones appealing as a battlefield resupply vehicle. Militaries have explored using drones to deliver everything from blood to ammunition to meals to soldiers, replacing a mission that would either be done by humans at great risk or not at all.

Russia, too, is exploring using similar drones for such missions. Russia’s army, air force, and Navy are all developing other helicopter-type drones for logistics, resupply, combat, and electronic warfare roles, says Bendett. 

If the Russian Post can implement drone mail delivery across towns in rural Siberia, it will have a ready-made system for continuous resupply in other fraught conditions. While the hazards of battle are distinct from the hazards of weather, any military drone supply system will have to handle weather as well as incoming fire. Being able to endure wind, take off and land in a modest clearing, and fly safely back are shared tasks. 

In the meantime, people in the remote towns of northern Russia will get to experience letters delivered by drone, provided the parcel doesn’t fall off the platform on the drone’s nose.

Watch SH-350 in action below:

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In flight, the drone resembles a giant seed pod, lofted in the wind and buzzing through a rotor. 

Created by a team at the Singapore University of Technology & Design, this new seed-inspired one-wing drone is named F-SAM. It is a type of monocopter, or a helicopter with only one rotating blade. Engineers first developed a monocopter in 1913, with testing in 1915, but a problem arises in trying to make a crewed aircraft out of an entire spinning wing: It is really easy for a human pilot to get dizzy.

Drone monocopters, like the F-SAM, have been much more common, and have seen a particular burst of design in the 21st century. Generating lift with its wing-body as it spins, a monocopter replaces the many moving parts of a quadcopter with a single elegant wing pulled forward by one attached propeller.

The design of monocopters is inspired by samara seeds, which when released from a tree, spin and float on the air until they are carried far away into fertile soil. What sets the F-SAM apart, not just from other drones but even from other drone monocopters, is that its wing is foldable, making the entire drone compact and storable when not in flight.

[Related: Floating whirligig microchips could help us monitor nature without leaving a trace]

“One of the advantages of the monocopter platform is its inherent ability for autorotation, the mode of flight of the samara seeds,” write the paper’s authors. “The monocopter is thus equipped with a natural fail-safe, thanks to this ability to descend gracefully in autorotation in the event of a power failure.”

Thanks to changes in how and when the F-SAM generates thrust, the drone can be steered, allowing it to navigate through complex challenges like a loop in and out of a window. The researchers demonstrate a flight time with the drone of at least 15 minutes.

[Related: Watch a C-130 cargo plane grab a drone out of the sky]

In their paper, the researchers explicitly compare the F-SAM to two small drones developed for military use. One, the palm-sized Black Widow, came from a mid-2000s DARPA project to demonstrate a fixed-wing scout drone, which was useful at distances but struggled with the precise maneuvering needed for indoors. The other point of comparison made is the Black Hornet, a sparrow-sized helicopter that can navigate in small spaces but is made of many small moving parts.  

In 2009, Lockheed Martin developed a monocopter called the SAMARAI, a DARPA-funded project originally designed to deliver a small scout. The SAMARAI lost the camera and got larger in subsequent tests, proving the drone could work but missing a clear use case.

With its simple body and high maneuverability, the F-SAM offers a drone that soldiers could someday lift from their pockets, and then use to explore the inside of a building. What makes this a somewhat harder task than the Black Hornet or even a small quadcopter is that any camera attached to the F-SAM would also be spinning. For video, that would make the person watching the transmission as dizzy as if they were themselves spinning, or it would require a complex stabilization mechanism on the drone. Other sensors, like the spinning lasers of LiDAR, would be a natural fit, allowing the F-SAM to map out the interior of a room, even if it couldn’t see it in the traditional sense.

[Related: This cutting-edge drone is headed out to pasture at an Air Force museum]

“[F-SAM] can be a good contender for single-use GPS-guided reconnaissance missions,” Shane Kyi Hla Win told IEEE Spectrum. “As it uses only one actuator for its flight, it can be made relatively cheaply. It is also very silent during its flight and easily camouflaged once landed. Various lightweight sensors can be integrated onto the platform for different types of missions, such as climate monitoring.”

Using the natural aerodynamics of the drone’s body, as well as its ability to land gently, means that several F-SAM drones could be used to seed sensors in advance of a military advance. With low-power uses, perhaps microphones picking up audio or even just little seismometers listening for the tell-tale rumble of tanks, scattered drones could be a rapidly deployed and easily concealed sensor system, providing immediate early warning of enemy movements.

With the F-SAM compact enough to fit in a pocket and be launched by hand or from the ground, the form opens up new options for how militaries might add reconnaissance to their forces. If sending an F-SAM to scout ahead is as effortless as hurling a grenade, scouting drones could move from a specialized piece of equipment to standard, almost disposable gear.

Watch it in flight below:

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In the sky above the desert, a drone mated with a C-130, a cargo plane that was acting as an airborne aircraft carrier. Once its landing hook attached to the C-130’s recovery latch, the drone’s wing rotated 90 degrees, becoming flush with its body, so that it could fit within the cargo plane’s storage bay. Pulled into the crane-like gripper of the C-130’s retrieval arm, the drone lands in its ride in the sky.

On November 5, DARPA announced that Gremlins, its long-in-the-works program to make an air-launched and air-recoverable drone, successfully demonstrated airborne recovery. The flight test, which took place in October, featured two Gremlin drones flying a series of checks. One of those Gremlins latched onto and was loaded inside the C-130. The other, as Defense News reports, crashed during the tests.

“Airborne recovery is complex,” Paul Calhoun, DARPA’s program manager for Gremlins, said in a release. “We will take some time to enjoy the success of this deployment, then get back to work further analyzing the data and determining next steps for the Gremlins technology.”

The Gremlins program dates back to at least 2015, though the concept of aircraft launched and recovered from other aircraft has a much longer history. The utility is straightforward: small vehicles have less capacity for fuel, weapons, or other payloads, so it makes sense to deliver them inside a bigger, more efficient craft, which can then pick them up again. Meanwhile, C-130s, the venerable workhorses of military cargo transport, are an ideal carrier craft. Reliable, durable, and spacious, a C-130 is good at getting where it needs to go.

As a lumbering cargo aircraft, C-130s are big targets for anti-aircraft weapons, but if the drones that they are launching into combat can fly the last leg of the journey on its own, the C-130 can stay safely out of range of an adversary’s weapons.

[Related: DARPA’s Gremlin drones could be reloaded while airborne]

In the 1930s, the US Navy experimented with airships that could launch and recover biplanes from racks inside the craft. That recovery element is essential, especially for aircraft with a pilot on board, because it makes it a mission that pilots can fly away from. In the Cold War, the Air Force developed the trapeze-launched Goblin, an ultracompact jet fighter that could ride inside the bomb bay of a nuclear-armed bomber to protect it from other fighter jets.

Gremlins is not an exact continuation of prior aircraft-launched aircraft, though it shares some important principles. Being able to launch and recover from a rack inside the carrier means the drone doesn’t need to operate from a runway. With its fold-under wing and compact form, four Gremlins can fit in the pay of a C-130.

Being able to field four drones at once from a single C-130 would let the plane scout a wide area, or potentially launch attacks on several targets. Scouting is the most straightforward mission for a Gremlin, but it could also carry tools for electronic warfare, like jammers that mess up with sensors, and it’s possible future drones could be armed with bombs and other conventional weapons.

[Related: This Airbus prototype could deploy drones from cargo planes]

Even with the successful mid-air recovery of one of the Gremlin drones, much work needs to be done before the program represents a useful military tool. Future milestones likely include the launch and recovery of multiple drones. If that all works, then the Air Force will have a long-promised tool of drone warfare: a working swarm.

Swarms of multiple drones are one of the few ways to upset the balance between attacking aircraft and anti-air defenses. The cost calculus for decades has been that an anti-air missile is cheaper than the human-crewed plane it’s destroying, sometimes by orders of magnitude. That imbalance has led to the development of stealth planes, which are hard to hit but even more expensive. Drones bend the equation the other way, by creating multiple cheap targets that overwhelm defenses on hand.

Sending eight drones to do a mission that might have previously required two fighter jets means risking more airframes, but the drones are all more expendable than a fighter. If missiles take out part of the swarm, the remaining drones can still complete the mission and, now, return to be recovered in mid-air so that they can live to fly another day. 

The successful recovery of a Gremlin in mid-air is a big step towards useful drone swarms. It makes Gremlins at least as successful as the crewed aircraft-borne-aircraft projects of the 1930s and 1940s. Should the program successfully demonstrate swarm launch and recovery, it will finally surpass the goblins and biplanes of the past.

Watch the video of the event here or below.

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The Air Force wants its next jet to be fast, cheap, and eminently flexible. It is arriving in the form of a drone, designed in such a way that it can be modified over and over again as a platform. To build this drone jet, the Air Force Research Lab awarded a contract worth almost $18 million to Kratos, maker of aerial target drones as well as the Valkyrie and Mako combat drones.

Formally called the “Off-Boarding Sensing Station” (OBSS), the program is a specific request for “the design, development, and flight demonstration in an open architecture aircraft concept to achieve the goals of rapid time-to-market and low acquisition cost,” with an expected delivery of Oct. 31, 2022.

Kratos hinted at development of the program before the contract was awarded on October 26, 2021, but even with some of that development occurring previously, creating a new and usable jet in the space of a few years is a remarkable shift. This can be read, in part, as a response to the long and somewhat tortured history of the F-35 series jet, the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps’ primary fighter, which was decades in development. 

If the OBSS can be delivered as promised, it will offer a complement to the existing Air Force fighter wings. This drone is not a rival to the F-35, but instead billed as a force multiplier, allowing the robotic escort to carry additional weapons and sensors and, importantly, to take on some of the risk from the fight itself. One way to think of the OBSS is as a tool connected with a fighter, which receives orders from the pilot and can share what its sensors see.

[Related: This cutting-edge drone is headed out to pasture at an Air Force museum]

OBSS will take off and land on runways like a conventional jet. Once in the sky, the promise is that it will “provide significant performance for sensor extension missions for manned jet aircraft,” according to Kratos. It also “will accommodate significant offensive weapons volume to also act as a weapons bay extension for manned aircraft.”

The term for this kind of collaboration, as used by the Air Force, is “manned-unmanned teaming,” and it lets the autonomy of robot systems serve as an extension of human-directed power. Another Air Force Research Lab program working towards this goal is Skyborg, which has previously flown in Kratos-built drones. Skyborg is envisioned as a modular AI that can plug into a variety of drones, turning those planes into more-autonomous uncrewed wingmates for fighters.  

Shifting the scouting functions to a cheaper drone protects the pilot’s life in the more-expensive plane, and means only some ability is lost if the drone gets shot down. In the past the Air Force has used the word “attritable” for drone programs like this, emphasizing that a lower cost means commanders can make plans with the expectation that some drones will be lost in the mission. For the OBSS announcement, both the Air Force Research Laboratory and Kratos used “low-cost” and “affordable,” which are subtler ways of highlighting the benefit of a cheaper vehicle relative to an expensive crewed plane.

[Related: The future of the Air Force is fighter pilots leading drone swarms into battle]

As Kratos president Steve Fendley told The War Zone: “Attritable means it’s going to have some limited life or limited number of missions, whether that’s one or 10 or a hundred, I don’t know. I would say that the programs we’ve been on and the requirements we’ve seen, there typically is a desire, at least, that says we would like this to be good for x number of hours or x number of missions.”

One way to take advantage of that reusability is outfitting the drones for the riskier parts of crewed missions. For an attack on an anti-air missile emplacement, having a human pilot in an F-35A or a C-130, for example, and directing the drone from a distance, lets the OBSS fly an attack route with some danger, with the goal of clearing a path through deadly defenses. This is a task that is sometimes done by cruise missiles or loitering munitions, which are destroyed in the hit. If the cost of OBSS is comparable to that of a cruise missile, or even a few cruise missiles, using one in battle with the expectation that most of the time it will return to fight another day makes sense from a balance-sheet perspective.

All of this future promise hinges on whether or not the prototype version in development by Kratos can deliver as promised. Fortunately for observers, the time to delivery is short, with an expected flight next year. Should that prove successful, the contract awarded has the option of an extension to 2024, with nearly $32 million more for the company should they deliver.

With a total possible contract award just shy of $50 million, OBSS is offering to develop a wingmate for stealth fighters at just 64 percent the purchase price of a single F-35A.

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Traditional drones and satellites for military surveillance could be joined by the PHASA-35: a new uncrewed aircraft developed in the UK that flies in the stratosphere— a part of the atmosphere unencumbered by other aircraft or satellites.

“It stays up for a long while and it can look a long way—those are two of the real key attributes for a surveillance platform,” notes Drew Steel, an aviation adviser for BAE Systems, the company that is developing the system after acquiring it from its initial designers at the British company, Prismatic.

PHASA-35 stands for “Persistent High Altitude Solar Aircraft.” The number 35 is its wingspan in meters: that’s 115 feet, as wide as those of a Boeing 737. But the carbon fiber aircraft weighs a mere 330 pounds, which is one three-thousandth the weight of the 737. 

The drone is a high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) unmanned air vehicle that runs on solar-powered electric engines during the day, and lithium-ion batteries at night. It’s designed to fly at an altitude of about 65,000 feet in the stratosphere, the layer between Earth’s atmosphere and space. For comparison, a passenger aircraft flies no higher than 42,000 feet. Because the air there is about a thousand times thinner than it is closer to the Earth, the aircraft’s wings have to be extremely long to keep it airborne. 

Steel says that “the solar power enables [the PHASA-35] to stay airborne for up to a year and at 65,000 feet, it’s above all the traffic and most of the weather, so it can look a long way.”

The company that designed it, Prismatic, had built two full-sized concept PHASA-35 aircraft. Phil Varty, head of business development for PHASA-35 at BAE Systems, told PopSci at the DSEI exhibition last month in London that it took just two years for the team to take it from a design to its first flight in February, 2020. 

[Related: Watch the Navy’s new drone fly using just sunlight and hydrogen]

That first flight was in the Woomera Test Range, over the virtually uninhabited outback of South Australia. During this test, it operated under full autonomous flight control, and the aerodynamic, propulsion, and power efficiency performed “exactly as expected,” BAE Systems reported. 

Then, in October 2020, the aircraft operated for 72 hours (down on the ground) in an environment that simulated the bitterly cold temperatures and extreme pressure of the stratosphere. These tests, undertaken at Prismatic’s facility near Farnborough, just west of London, also allowed the team to practice various in-flight operations such as the transition from day and solar power to night and battery power.

The company expects it to be in service within the next four or five years. “Even if Covid has frustrated some of our test flights, we’ve been continuing to work on the development program and done a huge amount of work on development testing,” Dave Corfield, Prismatic’s CEO, says. “The first true development aircraft is currently being assembled in the UK.” 

The fragile-looking aircraft is so light that it can be rolled out onto the runway on its two sets of wheels, each set consisting of two modified bicycle wheels. It has low forward speed, just about 15 to 30 miles per hour. As it gets airborne, it jettisons the wheels. Without wheels, and thus no landing gear, it is lighter and able to fly so slowly that when it needs to, it can land gently on its belly. 

“It might get a little scratched and we may have to replace a few parts, but it certainly isn’t damaged beyond repair,” Varty remarks. The ability to get airborne without needing the hugely expensive rockets that are used to put satellites into orbit and the fact that it is theoretically infinitely reusable make this aircraft significantly more cost-effective than a satellite. The PHASA-35 could potentially plug the gap between aircraft and satellite technology.

However, it is not designed to replace satellites, as it can only carry a 33-pound payload, such as a camera, while satellites can carry up to 53,700 pounds into low Earth orbit (99 to 621 miles above Earth) and 8,390 pounds into geostationary transfer orbit (22,236 miles). But it can carry the kind of cameras developed for the military that can have a resolution of 8 inches. That means PHASA-35 could theoretically see (but not read) a book on a table from its perch in the stratosphere! That’s more than enough to observe the movements of people, vehicles, ships or aircraft that might be of interest to the military. But the system is also of interest to civilian organizations that need to monitor something such as an oil leak or forest fires. 

“Operating this type of aircraft requires a completely different mindset,” Steel says. “You won’t launch it when you need it, but when you can. Get it up there when the conditions are right and then minimize its energy use whilst it’s on a holding pattern waiting to be given a mission.” 

He added that “you’d need several of these aircraft up there, dotted around in different zones, because they don’t fly fast, around 30 mph, so it might take a few days for one to get to its mission position. Once it gets there it will fly an appropriate flight path and it could even be stationary.” He explained that “if the mission is to watch a small patch and there is a 10-knot [11.51 mph] wind, for example, we could slow the aircraft’s speed down to 10 knots and then it would be stationary.” 

The prototypes for the PHASA are controlled by ground link, but there will be a transition to beyond-line-of-sight control that uses “satellites as a relay to talk to the airplane,” Corfield explains. He adds that the US-based flight trials planned for this year could not take place because of bad weather. “We had a team out in the USA on a test range in the desert for the summer but never got the climatic conditions to get the stratospheric flight,” he says. The two prototype aircraft have been left in the United States and the team will go back early in 2022 to try again. They’re hopeful that Covid restrictions will be lifted by then so they can return to Australia for further tests.

There are few other HALEs out there. The best known is the Global Hawk, from Northrop Grumman. This US drone, used for surveillance and intelligence-gathering missions, has a wingspan two feet longer than the PHASA—but its empty weight is 14,950 lb and it is powered by an engine that needs fuel.

Watch the aircraft’s first flight, below:

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A small boat launches a missile, a drone overhead spots a target, and the missile flies where it is supposed to. 

The exercise was a clean execution of technique, the kind of demonstration sailors train for. What set apart this particular demonstration is that every part of it, from the robot ship to the drone flight to the missile’s navigation, was done autonomously. Humans set this in motion, but it was machines that carried it out.

The demonstration was part of a NATO exercise called Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping Augmented by Maritime Unmanned Systems, or REPMUS. The training ran for two weeks, concluding September 24, and was designed to facilitate collaboration between navies and robots from several nations. The REPMUS series of exercises began in 2019, and it all took place off the coast of Portugal.

The event, in which a host of technologies were tested, is part of the military alliance learning how to incorporate robots into its future war plans. One reason to include robots is so militaries can put more eyes over more targets. It’s easier to direct a missile to a boat if there’s a drone overhead sending the missile target coordinates. It’s also harder for a navy to get completely blown out of water if it spreads missiles out across many small boats, each of which pose a threat and need to be hit individually.

Guided missiles, too, give naval commanders extra options. If the target boat is sunk before the missile arrives, an autonomous missile can find another target to hit. The missile could also disarm itself, awaiting retrieval or sinking, unexploded, into the sea.

[Related: The US Navy launched a missile from a ghost ship. Wait, what?]

The uncrewed boat that launched the missile was the MADFOX, operated by the Royal Navy. MADFOX stands for “Maritime Demonstrator For Operational eXperimentation,” though that’s also just a cool way to say “robot test boat.”

For this test, the MADFOX launched a Switchblade 300 loitering missile. While many loitering weapons—flying weapons that can find a target after they are launched, in a sense “loitering” in an airspace—straddle the line between drones and missiles, the Switchblade’s short flight time puts it closer to the missile side of the spectrum. Switchblades can fly towards targets under remote guidance by a human operator, or with autonomous navigation of their own. 

Before the Switchblade was launched, another drone had to find the target. This was a Puma, made by Aerovironment, the same company that makes the Switchblade. In the exercise, the Puma scanned for and found a target, what the Royal Navy describes as a “simulated target of a Spanish crewless boat.”

Coordinates transferred from the Puma to the MADFOX, the MADFOX launched the Switchblade, which then flew to those coordinates. Before the missile hit, it was called off, in what Aerovironment calls a “patented wave-off capability.”

The ability to not hit a target, or in this case to call off an entire hit by a missile, is a crucial part of human control over autonomous weapons. 

“The system launch from MADFOX was a UK first, demonstrating the potential of uncrewed surface vessels for lethal and other payloads,” Commander Antony Crabb, who led the experiment team for the Royal Navy, said in a release. Crabb continued, “crucially, the whole serial was commanded, enabled and facilitated using information provided by uncrewed systems.”

[Related:The Royal Navy’s jetpack demo is astonishing—and impractical]

If autonomous machines are to join humans on the battlefield, to be effective those machines will need to communicate quickly with both human operators and other machines. In this test, a flying robot found a target, gave those coordinates to a robot boat, which then used those coordinates as the targeting information for a robot missile. It’s a triumph of data communication to have three such machines able to process, share, and act on that same information.

This bridge of coordination, from finding a target to pressing a trigger, is known as “sensor-to-shooter.” Minimizing the time and, more importantly, friction between machines that detect enemies and the weapons that fire on them is a long-running military goal. What makes it stand out here, especially, is that the US drone doing the sensing was a spotter for a UK-operated boat. 

Exercises are military tests under controlled conditions, without a hostile enemy interfering through violence. It’s a good way to first figure out if robots from different nations can easily communicate, and by all reports that is what happened here. Autonomy on such machines can also be a hedge against broken communications, as it allows robots to still work even when there’s signal interference. 

What the Royal Navy, and the US Navy, showed in this test is that under ideal circumstances, robots can find a target, launch a missile at it, and then abort the missile strike before impact. It’s a good start towards being able to do the same in a shooting war.

Watch, below:

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Meet LEO: a robot that can walk on two legs, fly, hop, skateboard, and even slackline. 

This mix between a drone and a traditional robot was developed by a team at Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies, and its creators claim that LEO is the first robot with both multi-joint legs and propeller-based thrusters—which helps it fly and allows it to achieve a high degree of balance control. They further detailed LEO’s range of capabilities and potentials in a new paper published this week in Science Robotics. 

Caltech engineers modeled the design for LEO, which is short for LEONARDO (LEgs ONboARD drOne), after birds, which can move about and maneuver through a variety of environments with relative ease. 

“Think about the way birds are able to flap and hop to navigate telephone lines,” Soon-Jo Chung, the corresponding author on the paper and a professor at Caltech, said in a press release. “A complex yet intriguing behavior happens as birds move between walking and flying.” They wanted to transpose this ability onto a robot, which would allow for it to traverse through tricky landscapes. 

[Related: A tuna robot reveals the art of gliding gracefully through water]

LEO is 2.5 feet tall, and its two carbon fiber legs are each broken down into three actuated joints. There’s a heel design at the tip of the robot legs that stabilizes the robot when it’s standing still, and makes it look like it’s wearing tiny stilettos. 

It has sensors that help it operate indoors and outdoors; in fact, LEO is decked out in sensors from head to toe. It has an onboard computer, motor controllers for propellers and legs, an inertial measurement unit, batteries, and a stereo camera for navigation. There are four angled propeller thrusters attached onto its shoulders, which work a bit like wings—they allow the robot to fly and keep upright while it’s walking. Information from the sensors and cameras are relayed back to LEO through feedback control algorithms, which tell LEO what to do next. 

The robot’s balance is pristine. When LEO walks, it kind of wobbles. You can poke or probe it, and it won’t fall over. This kind of balance is what allows it to carry out actions considered difficult even for humans, like steering a skateboard and shuffling along a slackline. 

Imagine that as humans walk, we shift our weight, lean forward, or bend at the knees, adjusting the position and orientation of our legs to keep our balance. LEO does something similar. 

[Related: This magnetic robot arm was inspired by octopus tentacles]

Most advanced two-legged robots can tackle multi-faceted terrains that may be rocky, dip up and down unexpectedly, or warp and twist like a labyrinthe, in the same ways humans do: by switching expertly between jumping, running, climbing. In the past, flying robots approached these challenges by avoiding the ground altogether, but they have their limitations too; mainly, they consume a lot of energy during flight. A robot from Boston Dynamics can even parkour. 

“Robots with a multimodal locomotion ability are able to move through challenging environments more efficiently than traditional robots by appropriately switching between their available means of movement,” Kyunam Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and an author on the paper, said in a statement. “LEO aims to bridge the gap between the two disparate domains of aerial and bipedal locomotion that are not typically intertwined in existing robotic systems.”

So what’s the point of this clever bot? Broken down into parts, the separate mechanisms that come together to make LEO could be independently used to improve landing gear systems for existing robots and other types of flying machines. This could even be extended to a future Mars rotorcraft, for example, the team says. LEO could also perform inspections, repairs, or replacements at locations that are difficult for humans to reach, like on rooftops, high-voltage telephone lines, or bridges. 

[Related: Tesla wants to make humanoid robots. Here’s their competition.]

But, as robotics go, LEO could always be better. The team already has plans to rework its leg design so that it’s more rigid and can support more weight. They’re also thinking about increasing the thrust force of the propellers. 

Lastly, they’re tinkering with ways to make LEO more autonomous so that it can sense its surroundings in order to self-adjust how much weight it puts on the legs and when it should transition from walking to flying. The team plans to install a drone landing algorithm in LEO as well, which involves deep neural networks that can help LEO calculate the best landing trajectory using its current speed and position. And if they integrate additional sensors that can help LEO better understand the state of its environment, then it could make its own decisions about what combination of walking and flying would be the safest, most energy-efficient way to get from point A to B. 

Watch LEO in action, below:

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Three Reapers converged on Oahu, Hawaii in September. The drones arrived by air, one each from Nevada and New Mexico, the third transported in its carrying case, known as a coffin, also from New Mexico. This grim trio, the first Reapers deployed to the 50th state, were part of ACE Reaper, a training exercise with the goal of figuring out how the drones could be of use in a war in the Pacific. 

An iteration on the iconic Predator drone airframe, the Reaper is the defining drone of the War on Terror, and saw years of action above Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Predators, initially unarmed, were retrofitted with missiles. Reapers, building on that experience, were armed from the start.

Afghanistan is landlocked, and while the other countries familiar to Reaper operators are to varying degrees coastal, much of what Reapers have been used to track are terrestrial targets. This high-flying long endurance drone is a machine built to track people and vehicles moving over land. 

While many of the theaters of the War on Terror are still active, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was done in part because, as President Biden has said explicitly, “We’re engaged in a serious competition with China,” and “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan.”

Geography dictates that any war fought between the United States and China, should it not end immediately in nuclear salvos, would be fought over islands in the Pacific, most likely the eastern Pacific. For the Marine Corps, which would do much of that fighting, that means learning to adapt decades of experience of war on land to island missions.

This means that the Pentagon has to find new uses for the tools it has on hand. The Hawaiian islands have long been used as bases for the US military. By operating out of Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay, on Oahu, the Reapers are able to fly over the whole island chain with ease.

[Related: This drone knows precisely where to drop a life-saving raft]

“The monthlong exercise, which ends on Oct. 8, focuses on bringing drones into the Air Force’s strategy of “Agile Combat Employment” — or ACE — which has included deployments of aircraft and troops to islands across the Pacific to spread out forces to make them harder for Chinese missiles to attack,” reports Honolulu Civil Beat. “It’s the third iteration of the exercise, but the first to involve Hawaii.”

For Exercise ACE Reaper, the drones flew to the Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island, less than 200 miles away from Kaneohe Bay. 

“ACE Reaper provides important training for our aircrew, maintainers and support personnel,” Major Adam Smith, Exercise ACE Reaper deputy mission commander, said in a release. “This exercise sends a message to potential adversaries that the U.S. military is capable of responding rapidly to dynamic situations with a range of capabilities at anytime, anywhere in the world.”

The drones are the centerpiece of the exercise, but it’s the humans operating, training, working with the drones that will take away the actual learning. In support of its three Reapers, the exercise involved a total of 60 military personnel from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, and Marine Corps Base Hawaii.

Holloman and Creech have long operated Reapers, piloting them remotely with human crews switching out from control stations mid-flight so shift changes can take place. During Exercise ACE Reaper, the drones have been piloted remotely from Holloman. It’s likely that even after the exercise, when several Reapers will be based in Hawaii with the Marine Corps, they will still be flown remotely by pilots located elsewhere.

[Related: The US Navy launched a missile from a ghost ship. Wait, what?]

Training for war on islands and over oceans means adapting processes built for more arid environments to lush jungle, vibrant beaches, and vast swathes of open ocean. Some aspects of training and, presumably, future fighting will remain the same: Reapers are most useful in areas where people are likely to travel, and near urban environments. This kind of targeting comes with risk and error, for everything from target misidentification to follow-on explosions.

For now, the Reapers flying over the Hawaiian archipelago have been and will remain unarmed. The military currently conducts live fire exercises at Pohakuloa Training Area, despite public protest, and it’s possible that future armed training exercises could see the Reapers dropping bombs on the site. 

While Oahu was the site of Pearl Harbor, that famous 1941 battle in the Pacific, actual fighting in any new Pacific war would likely take place far from Hawaii itself. By training with Reapers over the Big Island, the Marines are learning how to conduct missions on Guam, over Okinawa, or in any number of populated and abruptly contested islands.

It is likely that the Reapers will excel at the tasks assigned to them by Marines over land. What is yet to be determined is if a sensor suite, built for tracking technicals on mountain roads and desert plains, can find threats on and below the surface of the sea.

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The United Kingdom is investing roughly $100 million in new directed energy weapons across sea and land. Split into three contracts, and announced September 14 at the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition in London, two of the direct energy weapons will be lasers that can stop drones, while the third will use radio to detect and track targets. It’s a push for a new kind of weapon that can face a new kind of threat, and do so cost-effectively.

“These technologies have the potential to revolutionise the future battlefield for our Armed Forces, enabling the prosecution of new targets in the land, sea and air domains and allowing commanders to meet mission objectives in new ways,” said Shima Fhima, director of strategic programmes for the Ministry of Defence, in a release.

As a category, “directed energy weapons” includes a range of technologies, all of which utilize a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and bend it towards military ends for different effects. That’s a broad wording, because the application can include everything from a laser beam of light so intense that it burns through a drone’s wing to just employing a radio signal to detect a helicopter.

What directed energy offers a military commander is a way to reach out into the battlefield and stop an enemy vehicle in its path, without needing to use bullets or missiles. Bullets and missiles have many advantages, and are readily available in a bewildering array of varieties. They are also to some degree finite: one a given weapon has run out of bullets, or a ship has fired its available complement of missiles, then it has to turn to other weapons for answers, or retreat.

[Related: Watch this French laser zap drones out of the sky]

The modern danger, the one to which directed energy weapons are a reaction, is vast swarms of cheap, expendable drones. An attack by fighter jets may involve a dozen or so planes; a drone swarm could contain hundreds if not more aircraft. Scaling up to defeat that with more traditional weapons such as missiles would be expensive and unwieldy, both in terms of weapons and because of finite storage capacity.

Directed energy, at least in theory, offers firepower limited only by the ability of a vessel to store and generate energy. That makes it particularly useful against drones, because every kill can be cheaper than the object it is destroying.

“[These] next-generation technologies could revolutionise the battlefield and reduce the risk of collateral damage,” said the Ministry in a release. “The systems are powered by electricity and operate without ammunition, significantly reducing operating costs, increasing platform endurance and providing unprecedented offensive and defensive flexibility to personnel on the frontline.”

For it’s nearly $100 million investment, the Ministry will receive a laser weapon to test on a Royal Navy Type 23 Frigate starting in 2023. In that role, the laser will be paired with other systems to detect, track, engage, and counter drones. They will likely combat drones by burning through their airframes. 

On land, the Ministry will test a laser demonstrator on a vehicle called a Wolfhound. The Wolfhound is a six-wheeled armored machine, with a crew of two and room for 10 passengers, used to carry troops into the action. The laser on the Wolfhound will also be used to counter drones, indicating a future where the threat to troops in battle comes not just from bombs placed along roads but also from cheap attacks launched by air.

[Related: The US military wants force fields that could stop nuclear missiles]

The third directed energy device, a radio frequency demonstrator, is not an explicitly destructive tool. It’s designed for use on a support vehicle, or a large cargo transport truck. From the truck, it will “detect and track a variety of air, land, and sea targets,” which suggests that the purpose is less about protecting the cargo truck and instead about turning it into the base for a useful far-reaching sensor.

Directed energy weapons are still very much an emerging technology. The US Navy fielded one on a deployed ship in 2014, and demonstrated that the laser weapon could, in a test setting, knock a small drone out of the sky.

What will be crucial for these UK programs is not just that they demonstrate a viable weapon, but that they also show it can be cost effective for its stated purposes. If a laser is too expensive to field, it’s far better to go with a weapon that can actually be brought into combat instead.

The post The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers. appeared first on Popular Science.

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The ocean is a rough place to have an emergency. When a ship capsizes, or a plane crashes into the sea, people are left with whatever flotation devices they have on hand. Then they have to wait for rescue to not just reach them, but to find them.

At London’s Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition, Portugal- and UK-based drone company Tekever announced September 14 that its AR5 drone can now carry and deploy self-inflating life rafts to assist in water rescue. The AR5 can operate in winds of up to 40 mph and with light rain.

Roaring into action, the AR5’s twin engines launch it into the sky from a rough grassy runway. Above the water, its internal bay opens, and a sheet of safety-yellow plastic falls out. That sheet expands as it falls, forming a rectangular raft. In the video, below, it lands in the water upside down, before a camera cut shows it on the surface right-side-up. A person swims into the righted raft, where they can stretch out and rest on the water’s surface.

The raft is designed to hold up to eight people, and it comes without oars or an engine. It’s no cruise ship, but it is likely enough. Provided the raft can be dropped close enough for people to swim to it, it could mean the difference between surviving and perishing at sea. 

“Until now, we could only be extremely effective on the ‘search’ part of ‘search and rescue’. With the Lifesaver, we can now help on the “rescue” phase as well, helping people to get out of the water, until they can be safely rescued,” Filipa Martins, head of communications for Tekever, said by email.

[Related: This heavy-lift drone could quietly carry a sub-hunting torpedo]

“We’ve developed an algorithm to predict the right flight path and precise drop spot. However, and for a safety reason, we don’t target the exact person’s location, but a close-enough spot,” says Martins. “This distance can be pre-programmed (we currently have it at 50m) [164 feet] or chosen by the operator, according to the specific conditions of the operations (sea state, condition of the person, etc.)”

This month, the Home Office of the United Kingdom said it was using AR5 drones to monitor for asylum seekers and refugees trying to make it to the UK’s shores. By finding the people at sea, the UK can save their lives while also controlling how and if they make it to the mainland, a policy France contends may run afoul of international law.

Finding people in the sea is the task of the many sensors carried on the AR5. These sensors include visual and infrared cameras and multiple kinds of radar. By scanning the surface of the sea, and processing that imagery either onboard or at a remotely connected server, the AR5 can look for unusual activity, and through that, potentially see people it needs to assist.

[Related: The US Navy launched a missile from a ghost ship. Wait, what?]

“We’ve consistently and successfully tested the AR5’s new Lifesaver capability, by deploying liferafts with very high precision in a fully automated process. This new capability allows us to provide a first response in emergency situations,” Tekever’s CEO, Ricardo Mendes, said in a press release. “For the first time, and beyond detecting people in distress, we can now immediately do something to help them.”

The drone doesn’t make the call on its own about assisting a person. Instead, the alert signals a human operator, who can confirm the drone’s findings, and decide whether or not to release the life-saving payload. 

“There’s usually an operator that is not only looking at all the information, patterns detected and alerts provided by the system, but also in constant coordination with the authorities and other assets available on the field, in order to maximize the chance of saving people on time,” says Martins. “The decisions are informed by the system, and taken by the operator, so if the system detects a [pattern] that it believes is a person in distress, the operator can decide, looking at the data, if that is the case or not.”

While the people will be stranded on the raft until human rescuers come along with boats or ships, they will at least be spared the risk of drowning from exhaustion, or of dying from hypothermia while in the water, a risk in all seas and one especially so in the Atlantic and the North Sea.

By operating from rough runways, and alerting human crew when they need to make a call while it’s in flight, the AR5 and drones like it allow for a greater expansion of what can be seen and surveilled, while only modestly increasing the amount of humans needed to do the monitoring. Including internal carried rafts as a life-saving payload is an unqualified benefit. It also demonstrates that the drones could deliver other payloads on other missions, from parachuting resupply to whatever else a military might want to drop.

Oceans are vast and hard to monitor. By shifting that function to a semi-autonomous machine, much more of the sea can be seen.

Watch the AR5 in action below:

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Someday in the future, the latest anti-submarine weapon could arrive in the form of a torpedo deployed from a large drone. A result of a partnership between British defense giant BAE and drone firm Malloy Aeronautics, the T-650 is an all-electric heavy-lift drone. Its payloads will include everything from battlefield resupply to torpedoes launched at submarines.

The T-650 debuted at the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition as a mock-up suspended in the air with a BAE-made Sting Ray torpedo attached. The torpedo, in service since the 1980s, can already be fired from ships, helicopters, and planes, where it uses sonar and navigation systems to autonomously track and hit targets. Putting it on a drone expands the range at which a ship can hunt submarines, and it also means that smaller vessels have a flexible way to fight that takes up only a minimum of deck space.

The T-650 is built to carry a payload of 660 lbs at a range of up to 18 miles, with a maximum speed of 87 mph. What is most remarkable about the drone is that it is designed to do this entirely on electric power.

In the release announcing the T-650, BAE emphasizes the electric drone will produce zero carbon emissions, allowing it to perform a variety of load-carrying tasks “whilst reducing the environmental impact of our armed forces.”

Compared to batteries, liquid fuels are energy dense, which makes them especially useful for powering small aircraft and operating from ships, which are both environments that constrain on-board storage capacity. In the 1960s, the US Navy operated the Gyrodyne QH-50 DASH uncrewed helicopter, which was powered by a large and heavy turboshaft engine that ran on jet fuel. Despite the weight of the engine, the DASH had a range four times greater than the T-650, and could carry payloads almost twice as heavy as the T-650. (One of those potential payloads was a nuclear depth charge, which partly explains why the DASH was seen as expendable.)

[Related: Russia wants to launch little drones off of other drones off of ships]

Beyond a claim at more sustainable maritime drone warfare, what the all-electric T-650 offers over the DASH and other gas-powered drones is that it can fly much more quietly. Ships use acoustic detection as part of the range of ways they detect incoming threats. With a smaller frame and a relatively silent approach, it’s likely a torpedo-armed T-650 could approach close enough to attack without being detected. With its 18-mile range, it is also likely that it could fly far enough away from a host ship to launch an attack seemingly out of the blue.

Beyond the eye-catching application of torpedo delivery, the T-650 is built for a range of cargo roles. These include transporting items between ships, or between ship and shore, or from locations on ground to troops in need miles away. In the summer, British marines tested the TRV-150, a different Malloy-built drone, for battlefield resupply of blood. That drone had a much smaller cargo capacity, which made blood an ideal cargo: even small quantities are incredibly useful.

For the T-650, it is easy to imagine a scenario where the resupply of bulkier goods, like food or ammunition, makes the difference between soldiers holding a remote outpost and them being forced to abandon it. If the drone can complete automated routes, it could replace a human driver or pilot taking time for the same kind of delivery task.

[Related: Drones could help save soldiers’ lives by delivering blood on demand]

BAE and Malloy even claim that the drone could undertake casualty evacuation, though no mention is made of how, exactly, actually evacuating an injured human with the drone would work. Perhaps the drone could sling a litter underheath, allowing an injured person to ride out under the rotor wash of the quadcopter. (When it comes to transporting human remains, where comfort and safety are less important, a drone lifting a litter to a morgue makes a lot more sense.)

Ultimately, how effective the drone is depends on how well it employs whatever payloads are attached to it. By exploring the possibility of a semi-autonomous scout, fire-support, and anti-submarine drone, navies could expand the capacity of existing ships to find and fight enemies. With the possibility of automated resupply, the T-650 could make ships and deployed marines more sustainable without traditional airfields or harbors.

For now, the T-650 remains a mock-up seen on a trade-show floor, and the beginning of plans to explore the development of the drone. Whether or not the navies of tomorrow hunt submarines with torpedo-toting drones remains to be seen.

The post This heavy-lift drone could quietly carry a sub-hunting torpedo appeared first on Popular Science.

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Russia wants to replace the helicopter scouts on its existing ships with longer-range drones. Announced earlier this week by Russia’s Advanced Research Foundation (an analog to the US’s DARPA), this new concept wants to have a drone launch a drone from a ship.

The process, in theory, starts with a cyclocopter, a drone that flies without rotors or traditional wings. Resting on the cyclocopter as a platform, a fixed-wing scout drone would be carried into the air. Then, with the cyclocopter flying forward, the fixed-wing drone would take off from it like it was on a runway, with the platform drone dropping away. For landings, the process would reverse, with the fixed-wing drone catching a ride on a moving platform, and then descending back to the ship. 

This technological turducken uses a novel style of drone to overcome the limited space constraints on small ships. Not all ships have room for aircraft, and even when they do, only dedicated aircraft carriers have room for more than a couple of helipads. That’s the constraint that this concept is aiming to address—finite space that can at best accommodate vertical takeoff and landing by small aircraft.

As for the cyclocopters, those are strange also-rans in the history of early aviation. Essentially, instead of fixed wings jutting out the side, or a big rotor above the center mass of a vehicle, a cyclocopter features at least two partial cylinders, with blades in the cylinder, that spin to generate vertical lift and forward momentum. In appearance, it looks like a paddlewheel for air instead of water.

What makes it work as a way to fly is adjusting the angle of the blades in rotation and in flight, letting the same cylinders provide vertical lift, descent, or horizontal flight. As a concept, the design has roots back to the 1900s, though it has mostly remained more of an engineering curiosity than a workable machine. 

[Related: DARPA’s Gremlin drones could be reloaded while airborne]

What makes it especially interesting for use on a ship is the way a cyclocopter can function as both landing pad and runway—but in the sky.

“The platform lifts an aircraft-type drone into the air, provides access to the desired speed and launch angle, as if it were taking off from an airfield. That is, it completely replaces the runway, becoming an airfield. Therefore, we called the platform ‘cyclodrome’ because it is like a compact ‘piece’ of an airfield,” Yan Chibisov, of the Advanced Research Foundation, told Russian state-owned media RIA Novosti. “On landing, the same platform catches up with the drone, flies up and picks it up itself. The task of the drone at this moment is simply to fly in a straight line. All operations should be carried out automatically without the participation of an operator.”

There’s a long history of aircraft launching from other aircraft, from airship-borne escort fighters in the 1930s to Virgin Galactic’s White Knight carrier launching its space-viewing pod from in flight. It is a process that drones make much easier as there’s no need to consider human comfort or limitations in the process. 

[Related: This Airbus prototype could deploy drones from cargo planes]

At present, this scouting capability is carried out on Russia’s small warships by helicopters. Or, on ships too small to even fit a helipad, it is done by launching drones from rails and then those drones landing in nets. That’s a smaller footprint on the deck of a ship than a runway, though it’s also a lot more involved for the humans operating the drones, as the pilot has to immediately steer the drone after launch and the recovery team has to collect and detangle the drone upon its caught landing.

“The Russian Navy recognizes the current [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance], anti-submarine and anti-mine challenge as limited by existing manned platforms – so it wants to make each vessel a carrier of aerial, surface and sub-surface drones and unmanned systems,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “This particular project advances the current Navy plans to station small aircraft and helicopter-type drones by proposing that a much larger long-range drone be available for naval ships even when there is no runway space.”

[Related: DARPA’s new combat drones could catch a ride from other aircraft]

Fielding more drones from more ships would let the Russian navy do a better job of finding and tracking threats at sea, from submarines to other surface fleets. Right now, some of that work is done by planes flying from shore, like the Ilyushin Il-38 “Dolphin,” in service since the 1960s. 

“The impending arrival of large heavy drones like Altius will probably replace these crewed platforms,” says Bendett. “Today, the Russian Navy is using Forpost drones that are based on land for increased ISR capabilities – in Kaliningrad, Crimea and Kamchatka.”

Incorporating drones to replace existing crewed aircraft doesn’t mean getting rid of the human work requirements of those missions entirely. Instead, it shifts that human work to monitoring and reading the scans from the aircraft, letting humans interpret sensor data and scan for threats while autonomous flight systems keep aircraft aloft.

It is a promise of tech hopefully making the work easier. Even if, to get that tech to work, sailors will mount a drone on top of another drone, and then pilot both into the sky above the sea.

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Slowly but surely, the Army is inching towards fielding its first true combat-capable, high-powered laser weapon mounted on a Stryker infantry carrier vehicle.

The service announced on Tuesday that it had successfully completed its first-ever Directed Energy-Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) “combat shoot-off” between two unique laser systems at Fort Sill in Oklahoma earlier this summer.

The shoot-off saw the two 50-kilowatt laser weapons—developed in a competition between defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Raytheon—participate in “a series of vignettes designed to emulate realistic threats and combat scenarios,” according to the service.

Those “vignettes” included simulated UAS and rocket, artillery, and mortar (RAM) targets for the systems to engage.

The laser-equipped Strykers “faced a number of realistic scenarios designed to establish, for the first time in the Army, the desired characteristics for future DE M-SHORAD systems,” the service said in a statement.

While laser weapons, long a dream of military planners, have only recently become feasible as a real-life combat system, it’s unclear whether technological progress will allow the Army to keep its ambitious timetable for deploying its laser Strykers downrange. But as far as Army officials are concerned, the service’s laser Stryker prototypes are all but ready for the next big war.

“This is the first combat application of lasers for a maneuver element in the Army,” said Army hypersonics and directed energy chief Ltg. L. Neil Thurgood in a statement. “The technology we have today is ready. This is a gateway to the future.”

DE M-SHORAD program manager Col. G. Scott McLeod added this in a statement: “We are building and delivering a brand new capability. This is not a modification or an upgrade. It took just 24 months for the combined government and industry team to design, integrate, and have it ready to perform in an operational environment.”

The Pentagon once envisioned deploying laser-equipped Strykers downrange in Iraq and Syria to counter the “flying IEDs” and explosive-laden drones of terror groups like ISIS, but applications to the European theater became a major focus for military planners after U.S. Army Europe identified a major short-range air defense (SHORAD) gap in the aftermath of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

While soldiers with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment have been rocking 5kw laser systems aboard Stryker vehicles downrange in Europe for the last several years, the 50 kW trial represents a major increase in both power (and, by association, lethality) over previous iterations of the system, one that might finally prove capable of effectively intercepting incoming drones and ordnance.

“Offering lethality against unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and rockets, artillery and mortars (RAM), laser weapons now increase Army air and missile defense capability while reducing total system lifecycle cost through reduced logistical demand,” the Army said in a statement.

According to the service, the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) plans on delivering a platoon of four laser-equipped Strykers to an actual combat unit by some time in fiscal year 2022.

Army officials had previously announced plans to stand up its first battalion of Stryker vehicles outfitted with high-powered laser weapons sometime this year with the goal of eventually standing up four battalions by 2021.

The DE-MSHORAD system isn’t the only laser weapon the Army is working on at the moment. As Task & Purpose previously reported, the service is also working to field a 300 kW Indirect Fires Protection Capability – High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) truck-mounted laser by 2024.

While the 50 kW Stryker will deploy primarily to drones and incoming ordnance out of the sky, the 300 kW version IFPC-HEL system could potentially channel enough power to counter incoming cruise missiles. 

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The ocean is an information-rich environment, if sensors are present to read it. The United States Navy, as part of its continued mission to operate throughout the seas and secure its own freedom of movement, is turning to new robots to collect and share that information, operating invisibly under the surface. 

In late July, the Navy awarded a contract worth up to $39.2 million to Teledyne Brown Engineering for these underwater sensing robots. Formally the program is for “littoral battlespace sensing-gliders,” or LBS-G, a clunky acronym rich with meaning.

Breaking down the jargon helps reveal what these craft will do, and where. “Littoral” is coastal, the spaces along major bodies of water that are of profound interest for human use, home to much boat traffic, and especially to any incursions that threaten activity on land. “Battlespace” is a messier term, but it is essentially how the military understands the factors of an environment— everything from the weather to the positions of vehicles to ambient electromagnetic interference—that might shape how fighting happens. Finally, “sensing-glider” captures the design of these winged torpedo-shaped robots, which propel themselves like planes under the surface.

[Related: The Royal Navy’s robotic sub will be a test bench under the sea ]

The robots selected for this program will be based on Teledyne’s existing Slocum glider. Depending on the battery, existing Slocum gliders can operate with a short range of 220 miles for 15 days, or a maximum range of 8,000 miles over 18 months. They can also travel on the surface of the sea, and from there upload sensor readings to Iridium communication satellites for dispersal. 

Teledyne says this program is the first “Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) program chosen for full-rate production by the U.S. Navy,” and one of these gliders was already the centerpiece of an international incident. In 2016, a naval vessel in China’s military collected a Slocum glider in the waters of the South China Sea, before returning it to the US Navy a few days later. 

For the LSB-G program, Navy specifications stipulate that the robot must be able to operate at a depth of 3,300 feet for up to 90 days. This means the robots can exist, in a range of conditions, as a useful yet expendable kind of weather station, checking in to inform the Navy as a whole about conditions under the sea, thanks to its suite of sensors.

Those sensors will read the electrical conductivity of the water, a dataset that can give the Navy information about how well certain sensors will work in the ocean. Conductivity is also useful to know for figuring out ballast requirements on a submarine, and better to have in hand before arriving. 

These sensing-gliders will also check for temperature and depth, both of which inform underwater operations, and can scan for optical clarity, or how easy it is to use visual sensing beneath the waves. 

[Related: Robots of the Deep Blue Yonder ]

With these sensors, the gliders can look for underwater naval mines, which are explosives that pose a threat to larger and crewed vessels. Knowing if mines are present, and where to avoid them if so, is vital information—the difference between safe passage and secure landings or watery graves. 

The bots also provide a lower stakes way to perform some oceanic monitoring and surveillance. The ocean is vast, and while the Navy may be interested in all of it, there is a finite capacity to monitor the sea. Using robots expands the range and reach of this monitoring, and it’s less of a big deal if a robot is captured doing this work than it would be if a human crew was captured for doing the same. 

Using somewhat expendable robots to collect this information expands on existing practices, in which aircraft would release floating sensor arrays called sonobuoys in advance of a naval approach. Underwater, the robots are hard to track, and on the surface they can be given new orders and relocated in accordance with changed plans.  

More broadly, these robots are not just tools, but part of the Navy’s broader vision for an “ocean of things,” a sensor-rich sea where what can be known about conditions in the water is collected and shared with fleets in real time, or close to real time. Knowing the shape of water means knowing the shape of battles to come, and even knowing how and where to avoid battles that are set to go poorly.

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After just a handful of flights, the first of the Air Force’s Valkyrie drones is off to its own dignified afterlife, on display at the National Museum of the US Air Force.

Having made just a few test flights, the XQ-58A Valkyrie Tail #1 is now a historical curio. The uncrewed Valkyrie drones as they exist in Air Force experiments are intended to be autonomous escorts for much more expensive, inhabited fighter jets. With its few flights and fast retirement, Tail #1 is demonstrating another key part of the Valkyrie’s mission: it’s designed to be expendable.

Technically, the term the Air Force uses is “attritable,” a succinct if jargony reference to the expected attrition of aircraft from regular use and combat. Priced at just around $2 million, the Valkyrie is simultaneously expensive by everyday standards and extraordinarily cheap compared to the fighter jets it’s meant to escort.

The F-35A, stealthy and flown by a human pilot, costs $78 million a plane after years of declining prices. When Russia announced its new stealthy Checkmate fighter had a price tag of between $20-30 million, it was billed as a bargain relative to the costlier F-35 family. Even the helmets worn by F-35 pilots cost $500,000, or a quarter the price of a Valkyrie. So if the attritable drone is merely a fraction as effective as a crewed fighter, the low cost makes it worthwhile in budget terms.

“The objective of this program was to design, manufacture and flight test an aircraft in 24 months,” said Dave Hart, the chief engineer for the Autonomous Collaborative Platforms program, in a release. “Our flight tests validated this overall system for performance capabilities and leveraged AFRL’s facilities. When we started this program, I had no idea it was going to revolutionize the Air Force.”

It remains to be seen how much of a revolution Valkyrie actually sparked, but it did accomplish something remarkably rare in modern military acquisitions: a short turnaround from concept to flying prototype to test use cases. 

[Related: The future of the Air Force is fighter pilots leading drone swarms into battle]

Built by Kratos, Valkyrie has its origins in part in aerial targets, built to be shot down for practice. Aerial targets are more than just a vessel in the sky to be destroyed—they have to offer useful experience for the human pilots trained against them, and to do that the vehicles must fly and move in the sky the way a target plane might. But it’s also a design principle that removes all extraneous parts, as there’s no sense in overdesigning a target.

It took two years from that early promise to a first successful test flight, by the now museum-bound Tail #1. Since then, the Valkyrie has proven successful in several flights, showing that the subsonic airframe can work when launched from runways or rails. 

The versatility of the airframe, along with its expendable nature, means the Valkyrie is also a testbed for another key component to how the military plans to operate autonomous robots in the sky. That’s Skyborg, a program that refers to a kind of autonomous pilot package that has flown drones like the Valkyrie, but also General Atomics’ Avenger drone model and the Kratos-built Mako drone.

[Related: An Air Force artificial intelligence program flew a drone fighter for hours]

Among its new tricks, the Valkyrie demonstrated it could even be an airborne aircraft carrier. Earlier in 2021, a different Valkyrie model released a smaller drone from its bomb bays while in mid-flight, demonstrating that the escort drone could carry its own drone escorts. Drones releasing other drones is a powerful effect if the machines are all working together autonomously, and a labor-intensive mess if each of them needs to be remotely piloted by individual humans.

In war, future wings of escort drones like the Valkyrie, combined with other crewed and uncrewed aircraft, will pose a real challenge to anti-air defenses. So long as the drones can communicate with each other and receive orders from human operators, they could shield other planes from enemy attack. These drones could then launch missiles or drop bombs of their own, and could work in conjunction with loitering munitions to disable enemy sensors like radar, and will altogether make destroying an aerial attack that much harder.

For decades, when estimating the cost and development of a new aircraft, military planners and analysts could look at the expected weight of the aircraft and derive an estimate that matched closely the actual cost on delivery. This number is called the “cost per weight parametric,” and while it has its origins in World War II manufacture, it was held up in several studies by RAND in the Cold War. Steve Fendley, the president of Kratos Unmanned Systems Division, claimed in a release that “The Valkyrie is the first Department of Defense aircraft system to break the historical cost per weight parametric.”

If it can continue to deliver value at that cost, then it is likely the Air Force’s new museum piece won’t just be a testament to the success of a small program in the late 2010s. It will, instead, be a harbinger for a new way of fighting from the skies.

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It is hard to shout at a robot and get it to obey the same way you might holler at Alexa, but the military is working on it.

Presently, humans pilot military robots into action. This is true for remotely guided drones and for ground vehicles, which are all steered by hand-held tablets. Autonomous features, from navigation to human-set GPS waypoints, help streamline this process, though issuing those commands still requires that a soldier enter them in a tablet or computer so the robot can understand.

To more seamlessly integrate robots into the routines of warfare, the Army is testing a range of robot-human communication tools. In late July, at a campus north of Baltimore, the Robotics Research Center (RRC) at West Point, together with another Army lab and command, tested methods that could make it easier for soldiers to communicate with robots—through tablets and beyond.

At present, remote piloting a robot, even by tablet, is labor-intensive. The soldier has to actively guide it in real time, avoiding pitfalls and paying full attention. Reducing that burden could come in two ways. First, the military could make the robots follow tablet-given instructions more autonomously, demanding less of the soldier’s time in battle. And eventually, with research done to improve robot ability to understand and act on human language, soldiers could do away with the tablets entirely, reducing the burden of commanding robots to the same as that of directing human troops.

This is not an easy task, in part because combat makes communication hard. Soldiers speak softly to each other when they need to conceal their position, and yell over the din of battle when they absolutely need to be heard. Orders shouted by officers are hopefully understood by those in earshot, who follow as best they can. 

[Related: These augmented-reality goggles let soldiers see through vehicle walls]

“The ultimate goal of the RRC’s research is for a squad or platoon to task teams of aerial, wheeled and legged robots the same way they would their Soldiers – no Linux command line required,” Daniel Gonzalez, postdoctoral fellow at RRC in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said in a release.

Using the tablet is a bridge to that future. In the exercise, the cadets trained with a quadcopter and a wheeled robot, connecting to phones, tablets, and a mobile server.

The robots moved autonomously and labelled objects in place using programming from the Army Research Laboratory. Then they shared the information they gathered with the soldiers on the tablets. This work builds on previous DARPA research to test swarming and mapping in urban settings. In 2019, the OFFSET program (for OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics) tested swarms at a mock city training facility in Fort Benning, Georgia. The swarms would fly out to map an area by tracing a perimeter of a given building.

For this exercise, the humans and robots were tasked with locating an injured person in an urban setting. This is a task with applications far beyond the military, and one vital in the kinds of battlefields the military anticipates over the next several decades. 

“This is a critical capability as we seek to better understand how soldiers will interact with these systems and how they will aid missions,” said ARL researcher Stephen Nogar, in a release. “While the mission was a success, there is work to do to improve the reliability and coordination of the behaviors.”

Some of that work will likely be done by the Robotics Research Center, which will continue to refine the autonomous code. Other work might be done in conjunction with Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, or DEVCOM. 

[Related: How do you make AI trustworthy? Here’s the Pentagon’s plan.]

In fact, DEVCOM researcher Claire Bonial has been working on natural language understanding, or how machines understand the ways humans talk, for a decade. In a research paper published this year, Bonial and her co-authors worked on a way for robots to first understand human language, and then try to understand it in the context of human phrases.

This part of the processing is vital if robots have to understand commands issued as words instead of instructions given as direct mechanical inputs in a computer. The way a person might say “wait and then attack” puts the emphasis on paying attention to an environment before following through, but a robot given a wait command without the ability to reason through when that wait needs to change to attack becomes a liability instead of an asset in action.

“We are optimistic that the deeper semantic representation will provide the structure needed for superior grounding of the language in both the conversational and physical environment such that robots can communicate and act more as teammates to Soldiers, as opposed to tools,” Bonial said in a release.

This research, from the cadets training for a search and rescue to Bonial’s efforts at language understanding, will have its payoff in the future, with robots listening to and acting upon human commands expressed in language. In the meantime, the military will continue to adopt robots, incorporate their commands as tablet functions, and adjust to piloted machines on the battlefield.

The ultimate vision, that of human-robot cooperation, will have to wait until the machines can listen in on briefings, or at least listen in on orders. And then, when the order comes, as bluntly as it might under fire, the robots and humans together can seamlessly spring into action, working towards the same purpose and able to communicate through words, instead of just tablet commands.

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Rostec, the massive Russian defense corporation, announced at the annual MAKS-2021 arms show in late July that it wants to make a better fleet of cargo drones, including one capable of carrying up to 2,200 lbs.

The announcement was overshadowed, like every other development on display at the show, by Checkmate, a new single engine stealth fighter jet designed all but explicitly as a counterpart to the US-led F-35 that’s filling out the inventories of NATO countries.

Nations do not win wars through stealth fighters alone, even if they are the flashiest pieces of equipment on a showroom floor. The cargo drones announced by Rostec exist in the shadow of the jet, yet they’re an essential part of how militaries will fight in the future. That’s because before a military can fight, it has to bring its supplies where it needs them. For initial attacks, this is easier, as the lines of logistics are clean, and planned out. When it comes to resupply, where every pound of ammunition or rations can make the difference between survival and collapse, it is harder. Cargo drones could help with that.

Rostec is already invested in smaller cargo drones. The VRT 300, which debuted at MAKS in 2017, can carry up to 154 lbs. At the show this year, the company announced the BAS-200, which will carry 110 lbs. Loads like these can help in a pinch, especially with compact life-saving cargoes, like medical supplies. But getting drones to work as regular resupply vehicles means increasing that payload capacity.

Building on the BAS-200, Rostect plans a version that can carry up to 440 lbs next, to then be followed by the drone capable of hauling 2,200 lbs. Should Russia get there, it will have a drone capable of not just last-minute delivery of vital essentials, but of doing the long-haul work that makes resupply by air possible.

[Related: Russia’s new stealth fighter is a bargain worthy of a Bond villain]

For a few years in Afghanistan, the US Marine Corps operated two K-MAX helicopters to autonomously carry cargo. With a payload of just under 7,000 lbs, the two drone helicopters managed to deliver a total of 3.2 million pounds. That’s the kind of haul that can sustain operations, though it is worth noting that Marines relying on the helicopters were also resupplied by more traditional cargo trucks. 

Developing cargo drones means not just building a domestic military capability, but also one that can be marketed to other countries. Dmitry Shugaev, who heads Russia’s office responsible for managing military technology sales abroad, said at the expo that Russia is aiming to capture 10 percent of the international market for drone sales.

That Shugaev set the expectations at 10 percent is a sign of how already crowded the market is for drone exporters. “Russia’s claim of capturing 10 percent of the global drone market is aspirational— considering that they themselves admit that while they were developing their current lineup, the international market was divided up among the major drone powers of today like US, China, Israel and now Turkey,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “There is interest there from countries seeking Russian expertise and technology [and the] question is if it would translate into actual sales.”

[Related: Drones could help save soldiers’ lives by delivering blood on demand]

Beyond the Checkmate and the cargo drones, this technology includes a range of vehicles and weapons on display at MAKS. One such craft is the ZALA VTOL drone, an adaptation of the existing ZALA fixed-wing scout drone that adds four rotors so it can take off and land like a quadcopter. The VTOL rotors are detachable, allowing users to determine on a mission-by-mission basis if a longer flight time is more valuable than a vertical landing.

Other vehicles for the export market included the Predator-esque Orion drone, which boasts an endurance of up to a continuous day of flight and surveillance. Long-lasting high-altitude surveillance is a major feature of how nations like the United States use modern drones in war, and so it makes sense as an export product, too. The Orlan-10, a much smaller catapult-launched drone portable by truck, was also on offer for countries looking for more battlefield reconnaissance instead of theater-wide surveillance.

Transporting cargo, finding enemies, and letting troops know which routes are safe or hazardous are all parts of a comprehensive approach to war. It is easy to overlook all the other functions of a military while attention focuses on an eye-catching jet, but wars are fought with mundane tools as well as exceptional ones. For people fighting in the field, a meal delivered by cargo drone is clearly as much a part of the war effort as a jet overhead.

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The best armor, if it could be devised, would weigh absolutely nothing. It would surround its wearer in an impenetrable aura of pure protection, holding all threats at bay. This idealized defensive system could come in the form of a force field, and it would be useful for stopping everything from nuclear missiles to small drones. With directed energy weapons, the Air Force believes such a force field is someday possible—but that day is in 2060 at best.

References to force fields appear three times in “Directed Energy Futures 2060,” a report from the Air Force Research Laboratory published July 16. The potential for military force fields is captivating—a concept that seems more suited to science fiction; the report actually contains an appendix of three science fiction vignettes. 

The real-world term to know here is “directed energy,” and force fields are one of the more distant applications of that idea.

As defined by the report, “directed energy” is any focused beam of electro-magnetic energy used for a military purpose. This can be the burning destruction of a drone from a high powered laser, jamming radio frequencies, or it can even be as simple as using a low-powered laser to illuminate a target for a laser-guidance system.

Directed energy weapons and tools are in use across a range of nations today. The report declares that at least 31 nations have directed energy weapons, and that non-state actors like militias and insurgent groups have also used them. Some of this technology, from counter-drone microwaves to pilot- or sensor-blinding laser pointers, is available and in use today.

Directed energy against missiles?

The most fantastical, and least attainable, vision for directed energy set out by the Air Force is using it to thwart ballistic missiles.

“Although a concept often associated with science fiction, in fact ground and ship-based DE [directed energy] defense systems effectively act like point-localized force fields against small and relatively soft targets today,” the report says, before suggesting that sufficiently advanced directed energy could solve the exceptionally hard problem of missile defense, or at least its technical aspect. It continues: “However, these concepts require significant technical advancement by 2060 to achieve the full range of power contemplated.”

The desire for force fields is not particularly new. In 2015, Boeing patented a force field concept that would use lasers to heat the air in between a humvee and an explosion, creating a counter-blast that dulls the effect of the bomb. It is a novel idea, a fascinating concept, and just a patent. The work of using energy to stop weapons is hard, iterative, and frequently ends in failure.

As our colleagues at The War Zone write, “we’re still a ways away from being able to fully realize these types of directed energy capabilities,” even as military studies envision new concepts to get from the present to that future. 

Putting directed energy weapons on airplanes, or even in space, would be required to create this theorized missile-stopping forcefield. The Air Force attempted an airborne anti-missile laser before, mounting it inside a massive 747. The program, despite massive hype in the 1990s and early 2000s, was canceled in 2011. Successfully combining power supply, accurate sensors, dedicated tracking, and the reliability to intercept an incoming attack was a huge challenge a decade ago. It would take significant technological lift to get it ready by the 2060s.

Directed energy to destroy drones

While using massive lasers to stop airborne nuclear missiles in flight remains well beyond the scope of modern technology, there are some more modest successes with directed energy devices.

“Although not necessarily as imagined by science fiction,” the report states, some Directed Energy Weapons in development today effectively act like counter-drone force fields.

[Related: The US military is testing a microwave anti-drone weapon called THOR]

In this anti-drone application, the directed energy creates a real but unseen barrier to flight, where high-powered microwaves or consistently targeted lasers disable the electronic systems guiding drones. The craft may not be immediately repelled, but with the energy blast damaging essential systems they will not stay airborne and active for long.

For example, THOR, a high-powered microwave weapon tested by the Air Force to blast multiple drones out of the sky, is a kind of directed energy weapon.

Directed energy to halt humans 

After the theorized anti-missile force field of the 2060s and the drone-disruption force field of the present, the report identifies a third type of invisible barrier of directed energy. This force field is the “Active Denial System,” a weapon used by military and police forces as a less-lethal crowd control tool. Blasting nearby humans with 95 Ghz of directed energy, it heats the outer layer of skin.

“People have described the physical effect of this [Directed Energy] as like facing a roaring fire,” declares the report. “This spectrally precise effect can be thought of as creating a force field that repels crowds around an embassy, base, port, or other high value location.”

[Related: The US military’s heat weapon is real and painful. Here’s what it does.]

Unlike the imagined force fields of fiction, which are portrayed as creating a purely passive shield against harm, these counter-drone and counter-human weapons are the far more immediate form of energy direction. The technology to invisibly prevent people from standing in an area may be a distant goal. The technology to harm people standing in an area or drones flying nearby is ready, deployed, and in the arsenals of multiple militaries.

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Blood is usually a finite quality on a battlefield. Battles can cause a number of injuries, from the minor to the critical. If a soldier can get the wound closed in time, they can staunch the loss, but keeping the patient alive may require an influx of new blood. As medics work to aid their comrades, they could receive help from an unusual source: delivery drones, bringing literal fresh blood to the battlefield.

A drone swarm capable of delivering blood was part of Autonomous Advance Force 4.0, an exercise by the United Kingdom’s armed forces in which Royal Marines Commandos trained with modern technology for future war. The early July exercise took place in Cumbria and Dorset, with a release announced July 17.

The swarm consisted of six medium-heavy lift drones, Malloy Aeronautics TRV-150s. The TRV-150 can carry up to 140 lbs, at a range of up to 43 miles, with a maximum flight time of 36 minutes. Malloy drones got their start back in 2014 as a hoverbike concept, which was then proposed for the US military as a kind of ridden-drone scout. The US Army explored a large version of the drone as a “tactical resupply” vehicle in 2017. In TRV-150 form, the drone is an octocopter, with two rotors on each of four limbs.

In testing with the Royal Marines, the drone swarm was “tasked with tactically re-supplying commandos with everything from ammunition for the assaulting troops, through to blood for combat medics.” (The Royal Navy notes via email to PopSci that they used a mix meant to simulate blood, and not actual blood, in the training exercise.)

Tactical resupply is a difficult task. The vehicle or drone has to get to where it is needed, with a small but useful payload. Ammunition is a perfect payload, as it’s used up in fighting and having more can be the difference between a position safely held and having to make a dangerous retreat.

Blood, too, is a cargo well suited to drone delivery. Spare blood is not a standard part of an infantry kit, and for good reason. The default approach is to staunch bleeding on the battlefield, and then do serious medical work once the injured soldier can be evacuated.

[Related: Researchers successfully transport blood by drone]

Yet there are some situations where flying in blood can become lifesaving. If the injured soldier is being tended by a medic but cannot otherwise get to safety, and perhaps stabilized in a held and occupied house, then getting medical supplies to where the injury is can be vital work. Researchers first successfully demonstrated blood transport by drone in 2015, and since then have only improved on the process.

Delivering supplies by drone means shifting the risk from humans, who could suffer injury in the action, to robots that can be replaced and will not need rescue if they go down. That allows more combatants to focus on the fight at hand.

Another way to save that battlefield labor is by having the drones operate in a swarm. Traditionally, uninhabited robot vehicles are remotely piloted, or crewed at a distance, allowing the flying to be a kind of remote work. With a swarm, one human operator can guide several flying robots, all of which communicate to each other and adjust flight paths to reach the same destination. 

[Related: Good news: It’s safe to use drones to fly blood around]

“This has been yet another enormously important step forward in Royal Navy autonomy and particularly Commando Force transformation; I have seen phenomenal progress through this series of trials over the past two years,” said Colonel Chris Haw, the officer in charge of the experiments, in a statement. He added that it’s important to keep in mind that “this tech is there to enhance commando excellence, not to replace it.” 

In this particular instance, the commandos were able to summon the drones from a chest-mounted tablet. Using a map function, they could drop a location for the drones, and then trust the resupply to arrive where it was pinned.

The TRV-150s also deployed Remus underwater vehicles, releasing them into the sea as part of the amphibious exercise. Using an underwater scout would allow the commandos to see if any underwater obstacles might impede their shore landing, and to bring appropriate countermeasures or route around accordingly.

In addition to the drone swarm and underwater robots, the exercise featured a human-portable loitering munition, a kind of semi-autonomous flying weapon that can receive orders from a human operator to attack a selected target. These weapons, paired with light vehicles, sensors, and other scout drones, facilitate a modern approach to coastal operations, all linked together by a shared battlefield communication network.

More work in this area is coming soon: The Ministry of Defence plans to test much of the terrestrial technology later this year with an exercise in the California desert. 

This article has been updated following more information from the Royal Navy.

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At first glance, the Expeditionary Modular Autonomous Vehicle, or EMAV, looks like the bottom half of a tank. It is a tracked vehicle, but one small enough to fit inside the hold of a V-22 Osprey aircraft. 

The vehicle, which the Marine Corps tested in North Carolina in June, is a literal platform for the future. As the Marines plan towards not just mechanized but roboticized wars of the 2030s, the EMAV will be there, a sometimes autonomous truck carrying whatever it needs to.

The EMAV is powered by a diesel-electric hybrid engine, allowing it to run parts of its missions silently. It can also, with fuel on hand, provide electrical power for the Marines using it in the field. Its body weighs 7,000 pounds baseline, with capacity for up to 7,000 more pounds of attachments, sensors, weapons, or cargo to fit on top. 

“They were designed from the ground up to represent what future tactical unmanned ground vehicles could look like,” said Matthew Fogleson, robotics & autonomy branch head, USMC Warfighting Lab, in a video. “To give us a common platform to develop tactics, techniques and procedures and standard operating procedures.”

Fitting the robot inside a V-22 is crucial to the entire Marine Corps conception of future warfare. The vertical-takeoff and landing Osprey can transport 24 people in seats (or 12 on stretchers) in and out of small clearings zones, allowing it to get right into the action. It’s an important capability for launching attacks, where a gun-equipped EMAV could wheel into action bolstering the firepower of the Marines on the ground. And it’s crucial for evacuations, too. Using the EMAV to carry an injured person from the field lets humans load the person into a vehicle, and puts only the machine at risk during transit towards the patient.

[Related: Autonomous war machines could make costly mistakes on future battlefields]

Both modes were on display at the June 24 exercise in Camp Lejeune, and helped the Corps explore how the robot might fit into its broader vision for Infantry 2030.

“This morning, they did a box reconnaissance of an LZ [Landing Zone] as part of an advance party,” said Fogleson. “Later, they did a casualty collection, so a patrol was out so they autonomously sent a vehicle out there to collect a casualty and bring it back to a casualty collection point.”

Casualty is military jargon for both “injured people” and “killed people,” a phrasing so confusing the AP style guide recommended against using it in 2019. Here, the procedure is largely the same: if the person was injured or killed on patrol, the response is to recover them alive, or bring back the remains if dead, and make sure that the proper care is taken either way. For the EMAV, the body would be a cargo item to move autonomously between points A and B. Provided a human is on hand to load their compatriot onto the vehicle, the machine can take care of the driving to and from.

When not transporting bodies, the EMAV can be used more proactively in combat. Controlled from an app on a toughbook tablet, Marines can direct the robot into position, and control the sensors and weapons placed on it. Fogleson said it took about two and a half days for Marines that had never encountered the EMAV before to get up to speed commanding it.

These weapons for the EMAV can include a mine-clearing land charge, launched from on top of the EMAV’s platform. For example, in February 2021, at Twentynine Palms, California, the EMAV launched a rope-like weapon, a string of explosives built to blast a vehicle-width safe path through a field of explosives.

Another weapon that can be mounted on an EMAV is the Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station, a versatile turret that’s a combination of sensors and machine guns or grenade launchers and found on vehicles like Humvees, tanks, or even some patrol boats. 

[Related: The US Marines are testing flying, remote-controlled grenades]

Putting a weapon on the platform lets a human operator fight remotely, placing the vehicle in harm’s way instead. With a speed of 30 mph, the EMVAs can also allow for some advantage of maneuvering, positioning itself around hostile forces or scouting ahead of friendly troops.

“Robots are going to operate differently than humans and we have to understand what that means for the Marine Corps in the future,” said Fogleson. “It’s really no different than the Humvees or the other trucks we have had in the past. The vehicle itself is important, but it’s less important than what we’re putting on it. Those warfighting functionary things that we’re putting on it are what really matter, are really going to change the battlefield.”

Check out a video about it, below.

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