NAVAL DRONES

Manned (SH-60B) and unmanned (MQ-8B) helicopters working together on USS Halyburton (FFG 40) - Navy photo The carrier take-off and arrested landings of the U.S. Navy's X-47B demonstrator have garnered significant press attention this year.  Less noticed however, is the rapid development of rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles in the world's navies.  Recent operational successes of Northrop Grumman's MQ-8B Fire Scout aboard U.S. Navy frigates have led to many countries recognizing the value of vertical take-off and landing UAVs for maritime use.  International navies see the versatility and cost savings that unmanned rotary wing platforms can bring to maritime operations.  Like their manned counter-parts, these UAVs conduct a variety of missions including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; cargo resupply/vertical replenishment; and in some future conflict will perform armed interdic...

See Part I on dronenets here .  History is full of instances where war and militaries drove innovations that bled into the commercial marketplace.  The information era has turned that trend on its head.  The "DomiCopter" below might be more publicity stunt than reality, but the operational concept is sound.   Unmanned K-Max helicopters are saving Marine lives every day in Afghanistan and reducing the cost of intra-theater lift.  Some day a similar dronenet will take over many of the vertical replenishment requirements for naval ships at sea, leaving manned rotary wing aircraft for higher value missions such as scouting and attack. 

Futurist John Robb has posted some interesting ideas on a concept called Dronenet , where he envisions a peer-to-peer logistics service using small UAVs.  The primary constraints to this sort of idea taking off in the civilian sector are hardware and network standards, plus, some likely hesitance on the part of the general public to have quadrotors full of Chinese food deliveries zooming over their neighborhoods. On the military side, we've seen a rudimentary version of a dronenet with the Marine Corps' apparently successful K-Max  VTOL UAV logistics experiment in Afghanistan.  During the 1990s, the K-Max was used by the U.S. Navy as a contractor-operator aircraft for vertical replenishment at sea.  Every day, the Navy moves tons of ammunition, food, and other heavy stores via sling-load pallet from replenishment ships.  While smaller, higher value - and time critical deliveries - such as circuit cards for weapons s...

Last Spring, the guys at CIMSEC wrote a series on how 3-D printing would revolutionize naval logistics.  Their vision is much closer to reality than science fiction.  The nexus of on-demand fabrication and unmanned vehicles was recently demonstrated in small scale at a venue where one would least expect to see cutting edge military concepts tested.  In another example of performance art-turned dual-use UAS military application , at the Burning Man Festival this year, a social entrepreneurship project called Blue Sky allowed visitors to scan an image of themselves, sculpt a miniature likeness of the person with a 3D printer, and deliver it to the consignee with an experimental octo-rotor UAV.  Despite challenges with wind, dust, and safety, the proof of concept demonstration was a success.  The ability to print and deliver parts on demand locally and rapidly deliver them to for...