Military systems integrators at Dynetics Inc. in Huntsville, Ala., needed mission-critical power electronics for a U.S. military research program that seeks to build swarms of drone aircraft. They found their solution from Milpower Source Inc. in Belmont, N.H.
Milpower Source is supplying Dynetics with several kinds of power converters for the Gremlins program of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va.
DARPA Gremlins will rely on relatively inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in volley quantities to saturate enemy defenses, using military C-130 aircraft to launch drone swarms of networked and cooperating unmanned aircraft for electronic attack and reconnaissance missions from standoff ranges, and then recover surviving drones when their missions are completed.
“We addressed the operational requirements through our advanced engineering design processes to exceed stringent environmental and mechanical requirements, primarily weight, without sacrificing performance,” says Joseph Widman, the Gremlins program manager at Milpower Source.
Dynetics is one of four companies designing UAV technologies for drones that are inexpensive enough so that occasional losses would not compromise the overall mission. These drones should be able to communicate and cooperate with one another, so surviving drones could assume the roles of those unmanned aircraft lost during the mission.
The other three companies working Gremlins technologies are General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. in San Diego; the Lockheed Martin Corp. Aeronautics segment in Fort Worth, Texas; and the Composite Engineering Inc. Unmanned Systems Division in Sacramento Calif.
For more information contact Milpower Source online at https://milpower.com, Dynetics at www.dynetics.com, or DARPA at www.darpa.mil/program/gremlins.
