10 May 2022

Army stretches little wings with desert mini-drone swarm tests

ANDREW EVERSDEN

WASHINGTON: In the middle of the Utah desert, the US Army plans to test the efficacy of swarms of mini-drones that the service hopes will provide a ISR, targeting and battle damage assessments.

But as the Army tinkers with the emerging technology at the ongoing EDGE 22 experiment at Dugway Proving Ground, service leaders already know one thing: With the swarm of drones comes a flock of challenges.

“There’s just waveforms and how they’re transmitted through the sky, and what’s in the sky at the time, and what kind of things the Lord has thrown into the sky when you’re wanting to do this, with the amount of power that you maybe have available to you — that has a lot of constraints and a lot of variability,” Jeffrey Langhout, director of the Aviation and Missile Center at the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, said in an early April interview with Breaking Defense at Army Aviation Association of America conference in Nashville, Tenn.

No comments: