Gremlin UAV Mischievous Teamwork
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Imagine a fighter pilot flying above the Pacific across some contested airspace. Suddenly a series of sound alerts are heard in his communications system – it’s obvious what this means. The plane’s radar has picked up a large number of objects circling around it.
Suddenly a swarm of drones appears in front of pilot, performing a synchronized set of electromagnetic attacks which disrupt the radar and communications. The pilot keeps calm and tries his best to intercept them, only there are too many. The drones escaped in the blind of an eye and the fighter is forced to return to base after all systems were neutralized.
This is not some Sci-Fi movie, but the new DARPA project. the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, today announced a new program to develop distributed drones that can be recovered in the air via a C-130 transport plane, and then prepped for re-use 24 hours later. They’re calling them Gremlins.
According to DARPA program manager Dan Pratt, the ability to send a large number of small unmanned aerial systems with coordinated capabilities offers the United States improved operational flexibility at much lower cost than is possible with today’s expensive platforms, especially if those unmanned systems could be retrieved for reuse while airborne. The agency is looking for an unmanned system that is smarter than a missile, but cheaper than a fighter jet, to be good for about 20 uses.
“We wouldn’t be discarding the entire airframe, engine, avionics and payload with every mission, as is done with missiles, but we also wouldn’t have to carry the maintainability and operational cost burdens of today’s reusable systems, which are meant to stay in service for decades,” Pratt said.
Gremlin, in the English folklore, is a small creature who spends most of his time sabotaging things. It penetrates different devices and causes them to stop functioning properly, or to work against the one using them. During WWII, there were many stories of Gremlins that sabotage the Allied Forces’ airplanes, causing them to crash above the sea. Who thought that those tale will be realized in our times?
