Darpa’s Developing Tiny Drones That Swarm to and From Motherships

[Lodestar]

THE US MILITARY apparently never tires of thinking up capability gaps, and that means we may soon see fleets of small drones dropping out of bombers, then later being yanked out of the sky by cargo planes. Cartoonish as it may sound—as is the case with so many deadly-serious but still far-out military concepts—it makes a lot of sense. And Darpa, the Pentagon’s weapon of choice for making crazy things happen, just chose four companies to push the idea forward.

Called Gremlins (because you weren’t already freaked out) the project calls for a new type of reusable unmanned aerial vehicle that can be air-launched on intelligence-gathering missions from cargo airplanes, bombers, or other military aircraft over “denied” (i.e., hostile) airspace.

Once their missions are complete, up to three hours later, the drones will fly back to retrieval area where a C-130 cargo airplane will collect them. Darpa released a call for proposals in the fall, and just announced the four teams short-listed for further development: Composite Engineering, Dynetics, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, and industry bigfoot Lockheed Martin.

cont'd
http://www.wired.com/2016/04/darpas-developing-tiny-drones-swarm-motherships/

[PeoViejo]

1. More Toys for the Boys. n/t

[Ghost Dog]

2. Whatever is technically feasible must be done,

of course. Only wimps would dedicate any totally non-macho time or energy to thinking about any possible, ridiculous as it may seem according to peers, you know, socially undesirable consequences.

This message was brought to you by... drone.

[Baobab]

3. This is how we will build tall buildings in the near future in just a few weeks.

Drones can assemble a building from modularized parts virtually automatically. the parts just click into place and lock. its really quite amazing.

GPS can make the positioning accurate to just a few cm which is enough to get them close enough to lock.