The Perdix Drone Swarm isn’t intelligent
With a claimed 20 minutes of flight time, it makes you wonder if the Pentagon actually knows what a drone can carry.
In a video released recently, DARPA made a wild claim that it has swarm technology developed as a weapon but upon closer inspection of the video, you would realize that the only ones flying in a swarm are but a handful of drones.
I know Americans are pretty bad at maths but if you happen to drop 103 Perdix drones and only four seem to fly in a formation, would you consider it a swarm?
Notice too that in the video, once they prove that five drones fly in a formation they switch to a radar imagery of the flying swarm. Notice that the swarm is able to stay stationary even for a brief moment. This is not possible with the fixed wing drone which essentially behaves in the same way as the Parrot Disco drone. The Perdix has a single propeller on its rear just like the Parrot Disco. How on earth does it stay still is simply gravity defying. You cannot position hold a drone like the Perdix in place until the rest catches up or forms into a swarm. So if this isn’t SFX from Hollywood, then I don’t know what is.
This is also the reason why we had Quadcopters, because it was the most stable for position hold. No other propeller drone can hold its position like that and certainly not the Perdix. In the video, you can see how the Perdix drone were supposedly holding its position within 100 meters of the target. I bet they hired Darth Vader with his voodoo magic to do this as I can’t fathom how they cheated the law of aerodynamics to do this. A fixed wing drone has to be constantly in motion like a shark. It cannot hold position like a Quadcopter.
The so called drone swarm is also controlled from a ground station. This means it has to know where it is and stay the hell away from flying into another drone to remain in a swarm. If you have a supercomputer managing the flying pattern of a drone swarm, it would be possible but to manage 100 drones flying in unison would mean having one of these supercomputers teetered to all the drones from a ground station. To know if they are close to one another would require proximity transducers but these don’t seem to be equipped with any. And without GPS, how would a drone know how far they are from their target?
Even jet fighter pilots get lost without the help with GPS so that pretty much explains where the rest of the 99 Perdix drones went after launch. Thankfully the lost drones are not equipped with a massive weapons pay load.
I can see the drone technology happening as a weapon, I don’t think the Perdix is able to hold anymore explosives than a hand grenade. It would be great on paper to have these all attack a target at once (which is like having four grenades being hurled at a target when the 99 of them miss their mark) but if they are directed at a tank, the reactive armor or the tank would render them useless.
There are only two things that have a lighter payload for the Perdix drone swarm and that is if they are dropping Ebola virus on ground troops or with a hip flask full of Mustard gas. But those two are illegal under the Geneva Convention.
I suspect the video is nothing more than a business proposal to extract more money for funding from the Pentagon and the these defense folks are in cahoots with the Perdix dudes to milk more money.
So the word is....meh.....the drone swarm isn’t happening but would the tax payers know?