Supply Deliveries – No Men Required

Supply Deliveries – No Men Required

supply deliveries

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The US army is developing a technology that will enable a UAV shipment of supplies on the battlefield. An unmanned aerial technology will provide supplies faster and more safely, officials said. Units are seeing things like quadcopters and Amazon delivering via drones, and they demand the same, said Robert Forrester, technical manager for the joint tactical aerial resupply vehicle program, or JTARV, at Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.

According to armytimes.com, the program is a joint effort with many of the Army’s labs, including the Army Research Laboratory and Army Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center, and the Marine Corps. Forrester said he works with industry partners and vendors to provide prototypes for evaluation by the user community.

The team is researching and developing in many directions, among them the hoverbike. “They’re all going to be vertical takeoff and landing-type systems. If you have to haul this vehicle on a truck to deploy it, you may not want to have a 1,000-pound vehicle that you have to lug around,” Forrester said.

Maj. Jeremy Gottshall, a requirements developer with Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Combined Arms Support Command, is reaching out to the force to gauge their interest in something like the JTARV. “If we have this development within their unit, they will be less likely to go out of the gate overloaded,” he said. “They’ll have the confidence that if their mission changes, they can reach back immediately in their unit to fly what they need out to them in a timely manner.”

The plan is to have an autonomous vehicle, which means there won’t be a soldier with a joystick controlling it, Gottshall explained. It will ideally be easy enough to maintain and operate without a licensed pilot. The program wouldn’t replace manned resupply missions, but it would help augment current practices, officials said.

The Marine Corps is also working with the Army on demos and feedback. Tom Heffern, with Marine Corps Combat Development Command, said demonstrations were done of a smaller version of the hoverbike.

“It doesn’t necessarily take an aviator to operate these things,” Heffern said. “It’s done by Marines in the field with limited training.”

More demonstrations and testing are planned for the summer.