U.S. military plans deployment of swarms of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles with inflight retargeting
WASHINGTON – The U.S. military has completed research on unmanned swarming technologies and has turned them over to the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. The Drive reports. Continue reading original article
The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
2 April 2021 -- The systems are the block 3 version of Raytheon's Coyote unmanned aircraft and launcher, a jam-resistant datalink, and software to enable drones to operate as autonomous swarms.
All of these technologies were developed in the Low-Cost Cruise Missile (LCCM) effort. While Raytheon led the development of the Coyote and its launcher, L3Harris was the prime contractor for the datalink, and the Georgia Tech Research Institute headed-up work on the autonomy software module.
Details about the LCCM unmanned project are limited, yet the project provides a decentralized autonomy capability for low-cost, conventional air-launched cruise missiles that can conduct networked integrated attacks, in-flight dynamic retargeting and reallocation, and synchronized cooperative and saturation attacks.
John Keller, chief editor
Military & Aerospace Electronics
