Meet DARPA’s Flying Gremlins

Meet DARPA’s Flying Gremlins

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a project that aims to launch volley of small drones from military aircraft (bombers, cargo planes, and even fighter jets) and to pick them back up in a Lockheed Martin C-130 transport. They’ve now picked four teams to work on the project, dubbed “Gremlins.”

“Gremlins,” as DARPA envisions them, will be networked, coordinated, small, and low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that will conduct coordinated assaults on well defended targets. These missions would range from electronic attacks to target geolocation and more. They will, in effect, replace “conventional, monolithic platforms” like manned jets or big, expensive drones.

DARPA has now awarded Phase I contracts to Composite Engineering, Dynetics, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, and Lockheed Martin. And so begins a three-phase programme that could result in a demonstration of an “air-launched, air-recovered, volley-quantity unmanned aircraft system.”

“We’ve assembled a motivated group of researchers and developers that we believe could make significant progress toward Gremlins’ vision of delivering distributed airborne capabilities in a robust, responsive and affordable manner,” says DARPA programme manager Dan Patt. “These teams are exploring different, innovative approaches toward achieving this goal.”

According to the agency announcement for Gremlins, each launched unit must fly out 555-926km at high subsonic speeds, remain in location for anywhere from one to three hours, before turning back for recovery by the C-130. The Gremlins should cost no more than $700,000 per unit, and each unit should be able to perform at least 20 mission.

DARPA has not announced a timeline of development, nor the expected costs for the project, but $15 million has been allocated this year already for the project, with another $31 million requested for 2017. Preliminary design reviews are expected in 2017.