We want to put those capabilities in to a system that will move from something like 10 kilowatts up to 100 kilowatts — up to greater power. We will work on things like guidance, control and precision.

Mica Endsley

Categorized in : U.S.

You might want to set the task for five or six UAVs to go and cover a particular area where they work in conjunction with each other. Maybe one has one type of sensor and the other has another type of sensor — so they could cue each other, if one picked up an object of interest, it could cue another one to go examine it with maybe a different kind of sensor that might a higher resolution. They would be working together to accomplish a particular mission.

It is built on the biological concept of say a swarm of bees, for example, where you can see a lot of them fly as a group but they do not run into each other. They manage some type of coordinated activity between them in order to be able to navigate successfully.

We’re working on maturing a lot of those kinds of technologies, we will be transitioning into airborne platforms to get them ready to go into a program of record by 2023.

The real advantage is it would have a much more extended magazine. Today’s have five, six, seven missiles. With a directed energy weapon you could have thousands of shots with a gallon of gasoline – a gallon of jet fuel.

We can’t just plan for one scenario which was the case in the Cold War — we have to plan for a whole range of scenarios because technological changes are happening much more rapidly. I don’t know what technology will be here I just know it will be better than we have today.

It has been a tremendous opportunity to serve as chief scientist across our enterprise and help find ways we can better serve our technology efforts. I hope I have been able to help address some of the challenges and problems with our science and technology as we move from a platform centric approach to a networked centered approach.