(Newswire.net — August 29, 2015) — We remember the opening scene from Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith, when Anakin and Obi Wan fly into the swarm of drones – Buzz droids, as they call them. That fantasy happened in a galaxy far away. However, on our planet this is much closer to the reality than we think.
According to Defense One, US Military is interested in developing a swarm drones anti-aircraft program. The main idea is to develop smaller and cheaper drones that can fly great distances and attack, not individually, but as a swarm.
The concept is simple in its core. One bee can make a tear come out of ones eye with its sting. A swarm of bees, however, can kill a grown man. A swarm of drones could surround an enemy aircraft, and begin a series of electromagnetic attacks, jamming the radar and the communications.
The pilot wouldn’t be able to aim at such a large group of targets, and he would be wondering what just happened, then suddenly, the swarm would disappear. The droids would have returned to the bombs bay of the large bomber, from where they departed earlier.
The pilot of the attacked jet would try to aim but there would be too many small drones, causing more and more damage. He’s been swarmed, and with his communications and targeting equipment fried, the pilot must return his expensive but effectively neutralized aircraft to base.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, (DARPA), announced Friday a new program to develop distributed drones that can be recovered in the air. They’re calling them Gremlins, mythological creatures that mess up airplanes from the outside, in midflight.
“An ability to send large numbers of small unmanned air systems (UAS) with coordinated, distributed capabilities could provide U.S. forces with improved operational flexibility at much lower cost than is possible with today’s expensive, all-in-one platforms—especially if those unmanned systems could be retrieved for reuse while airborne,” DARPA program manager Dan Pratt said in a statement.
“So far, however, the technology to project volleys of low-cost, reusable systems over great distances and retrieve them in mid-air has remained out of reach,” said Pratt.
So, DARPA is looking for an air-defense system than can be deployed in mid-air and reused multiple times. Getting a swarm of drones airborne and giving them a command to return to the flying base is not much of a problem. The real brainer, however, is synchronizing the drone’s actions and preventing them from colliding with each other, in another word – to make them act like a swarm.