The Air Force Research Laboratory hopes a typical automotive manufacturing technique might unlock the answer for constructing reasonably priced autonomous drones that could be fielded in large numbers.
The Aerospace Systems Directorate of AFRL, the service’s research and development arm, on Feb. 28 flew a General Atomics-made XQ-67A drone for the primary time.
But what makes this aircraft different, said Doug Meador, the pinnacle of autonomous collaborative platform capabilities at AFRL’s Aerospace Systems Directorate, is that it was built on a chassis that might function the inspiration for a wide range of other drones.
This idea, which the car industry calls “platform sharing,” has been a regular practice there for many years, with carmakers mass-producing common underlying frames on which they construct multiple vehicle models. Auto manufacturers say doing so saves money and time, improves a automotive’s reliability, and makes it simpler to maintain a supply chain of parts flowing since models have fewer variances.
AFRL hopes the identical approach will result in a revolution in drone construction, allowing easier and greater mass production and driving down costs — potentially making it easier to create fleets of drone wingmen flying alongside crewed fighters.
“What if we built airplanes the identical way the automotive industry built cars?” Meador said in a Tuesday interview. “What if we got here up with a typical chassis, or a framework around which you’ll be able to put disparate performing forms of aircraft, and what would that do [for] each having the ability to construct the aircraft quickly and construct them cheaper?”
The Air Force is concentrated on fielding a series of drones called Collaborative Combat Aircraft that might operate autonomously, in some cases serving as “wingmen” for fighters akin to the F-35 and the in-the-works Next Generation Air Dominance platform. The Air Force wants these CCAs to perform multiple missions, including strike, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare.
But when the CCA plan is to work, the Air Force can have to have the opportunity to field large numbers of them relatively inexpensively — an idea officials check with as “reasonably priced mass.” Meador hopes this common platform structure strategy could help the Air Force save on drone construction and achieve the type of mass that is vital to the CCA concept.
And the successful first flight of the XQ-67A, Meador said, showed this idea could work, even when the XQ-67 itself never transitions to a program of record. Just one XQ-67 has been built thus far, but he declined to say if more are on the best way.
“It’s another [development option] that, so far, we’ve not had,” Meador said. “We’ve essentially validated it by flying the XQ-67.”
The XQ-67A is designed to hold sensors and have the potential to fly autonomously — though it now can only be flown remotely — alongside a crewed fighter to supply intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Its first flight occurred at General Atomics’ Gray Butte Flight Operations Facility near Palmdale California, and was a comparatively short, easygoing test, Meador said. More ambitious flight tests are planned within the near future, he said, to completely understand whether the XQ-67 can do what it was designed for.
“We still must characterize among the flying qualities and things like that [of the XQ-67] so we will turn it from a flight test program to a possible experimentation asset,” Meador said.
Other drones that may very well be built on the identical underlying chassis in the long run could perform other missions akin to conducting strikes on enemy targets, or electronic warfare, Meador said — but they’d be a completely different aircraft than an XQ-67.
“If we were to make your mind up to go and construct an off-board weapons station next, all of the work that went into [building the XQ-67 sensor station] is already sunk, and we’ve already paid for it,” Meador said.
The XQ-67A grew out of a 2014 AFRL initiative called Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Technologies. Those ideas helped shape the Air Force’s CCA concept, and likewise led AFRL to explore the potential for its own platform sharing strategy.
AFRL worked with multiple vendors on the LCAAT initiative to work out learn how to make a low-cost drone that might perform various missions, which evolved into an indication program that led Kratos Defense and Security Solutions to construct the XQ-58A Valkyrie, he said.
Valkyrie experiments
The Valkyrie experiments showed it was possible to construct a drone that may fly for long ranges, at high sub-sonic speeds, and with sufficient payloads for just a couple of million dollars, Meador said. So then, he said, AFRL set a more ambitious goal of constructing a drone that might share an underlying platform with other drones carrying out different missions.
This Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Platform Sharing program worked through numerous questions along the best way, akin to determining what the common chassis should seem like, how big it may very well be, and what number of similar structures it could share to accommodate a wide range of drones. AFRL selected General Atomics to construct the XQ-67 in late 2022.
It’s now hard to say how much the XQ-67 may cost, Meador said, because just one has thus far been built and costs on aircraft typically don’t stabilize until multiple units have been built.
But he hopes the cost-per-pound of the XQ-67′s air vehicle, without sensors or other additional capabilities, might be roughly in keeping with the smaller XQ-58 Valkyrie. The XQ-67 is about 50% heavier than the Valkyrie.
Having a typical underlying structure could also make it easier and cheaper to develop subsequent generations of drones, Meador said. If the platform inside a sensing drone remains to be up so far, for instance, and only the sensors should be modernized, Meador said that may simplify the brand new drone’s development.
“It’ll keep the price down because we’re not going back and, from the bottom up, redesigning every part from scratch,” Meador said.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.