The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is in the midst of a series of tests to advance swarming technology for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). 

Recent demonstrations involved launching small UAVs from tubes and having as many as nine of them fly in formation autonomously. In mid-May at Fort Benning, Ga., ONR plans to boost that number to 20 UAVs, said ONR program manager Lee Mastroianni.

ONR logo

And in the spring or early summer of 2016, the agency intends to launch 30 such UAVs in under a minute from an experimental ship, the R/V Sea Fighter (FSF-1), during a demonstration near Eglin AFB, Fla. Since the UAVs have a maximum endurance of only a few hours, launching them quickly will maximize the time that all of them are in flight together, Mastroianni told reporters April 14 at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition.

The tests, which are being organized by the Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) program, are designed to help the Navy better understand how large numbers of UAVs perform individually and interact with each other.

“Part of it is getting people comfortable with the autonomy and what it can do,” Mastroianni said. “This is a big first step, but in no way, shape or form is it the final end state.”

ONR officials believe swarming technology has many potential applications. A newly released video contains a computer-generated scenario in which a UAV swarm conducts surveillance and precision strike on ground targets. And in a demonstration the agency conducted on the James River in Virginia in August, a swarm of small unmanned boats escorted a “high-value” ship and then encircled a threat-representative vessel to keep it away from the high-value asset.

The LOCUST program, which has used Raytheon [RTN] meter-long Coyote UAVs in testing, would eventually like to reduce its UAV costs to as little as $5,000 per vehicle so that swarms are an affordable weapon for warfighters, Mastroianni said. Although the UAVs can be recovered during tests, retrieving a large number of them during operations at sea would likely be impractical.

“My goal is they’re disposable,” he said.