Video of the week: DARPA recruits gremlins for air supremacy

This week’s video is a mixture of explanatory CGI and real footage that demonstrates how ‘volley quantities’ of 'gremlins' - a detachment of unmanned aerial vehicles - can be launched and recovered while airborne.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bvf9v4EHovY

The capability is being developed for DARPA’s acronym-free ‘Gremlins’ UAS programme, which is being taken forward by a team led by Alabama-based Dynetics.

Phase One contracts were announced on March 31, 2016 that challenged participating companies - Composite Engineering, Dynetics, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, and Lockheed Martin – to realise DARPA’s vision of multiple UAVs launching from existing platforms while those planes remained clear of danger. The gremlins would then set about conducting ‘complex, highly-adaptive missions in contested environments’.

After their mission, the gremlins would then be retrieved by a C-130 military transport aircraft, taken back to base and readied for their next mission.

In April 2018 Dynetics received $38.6m to take the project into its third and final stage, which is scheduled to culminate in the airborne launch and safe recovery of multiple UAVs onto a C-130 in late 2019.