Today I came across an article about something new the Pentagon is testing. Autonomous Swarming Drones. Has an interesting ring to it. Conjures up thoughts of Skynet from the Terminator series.
Popular Mechanics here has more details about the testing.
The video on the page is certainly interesting. It shows an F-18 hornet dropping the drones from chaff pods. The drones then fly to preselected points to perform different missions. Seems like with enough work the drones can do some interesting things. I wonder if they load up a B-52 how many they could launch at once. They can take out multiple targets en mass.
An arm of the Pentagon charged with fielding critical new technologies has developed a drone that not only carries out its mission without human piloting, but can talk to other drones to collaborate on getting the job done. The Perdix autonomous drone operates in cooperative swarms of 20 or more, working together towards a single goal.
Named after a character from Greek mythology that was changed into a partridge, the bird-sized Perdix drones were featured on the news program "60 Minutes" last night, January 8. In footage taken over the skies of Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, a trio of F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters release a total of 103 Perdix drones from small pods mounted on hardpoints on both wings. The drones are capable of withstanding ejection at speeds of up to Mach 0.6 and temperatures as low as minus 10 degrees Celsius.Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
GPS data, combined with a map of the area, shows that during the October 26 test the fighters released their Perdix drones in a long line their flight path. The drones formed up at a preselected point and then headed out to perform four different missions. Three of the missions involved hovering over a target while the fourth mission involved forming a 100-meter-wide circle in the sky.
And here's the video.
