Investing in Defense Robotics

There is no single weapon system in the world more expensive, more sophisticated, or more powerful than the U.S. Navy’s new Gerald R. Ford-class supercarrier.

At $13 billion a pop and running $6.5 million per day just to keep it and its 6,000+ member crew operating, nothing even comes close.

Putting this into perspective, each one of these ships costs more than all but the top 20 national defense budgets in the world.

One of these 21st century floating Air Force bases is already in service — the flagship and namesake of the series, the Gerald R. Ford — and nine more are planned for construction.

All told, these additions to our fleet will increase the Navy’s ability to project power, expanding the existing fleet of 10 Nimitz-class carriers dramatically.

However, for every giant, there is a great weakness, and the Gerald R. Ford and its sister ships are no exception.

The big Achilles heel of this super-weapon is the anti-ship missile — specifically, the hypersonic variety currently being developed and deployed by our two biggest potential military rivals: Russia and China.

In stark contrast to its target, the anti-ship missile is relatively cheap, very hard to see, even harder to hit, and all but impossible to dodge.

Modern David vs. Goliath: David Shows Up With a Nuke

One perfect example of this is the Russian P-800 Oniks, which flies just 30 feet above the water at the speed of a rifle bullet for up to 400 miles before hitting its target with either an armor-piercing conventional warhead or a nuclear-tipped option, capable of taking out a carrier and its entire surface group.

They cost less than $3 million, and in Russian, Syrian, and Indonesian arsenals, they number in the hundreds. Firing swarms of these fast-moving, highly accurate weapons at a single carrier is the definition of cost-effective warfare.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese have developed a ballistic missile solely for the purpose of tackling the overwhelming power of the American supercarrier.

Designed to overwhelm defensive measures through sheer speed, the DF-21D — which has had Pentagon analysts worried since its introduction last year (early models have been in service since the 1990s) — can strike from hundreds of miles away and reach its target in mere minutes, as it takes advantage of a high-altitude trajectory before coming down on its target at close to the speed of a falling satellite.

It gives the Navy a lot to worry about…

But there’s a potential solution to all this, and it comes in a very surprising form.

Not Bigger, Faster, and Meaner… Smaller, Smarter, and More Numerous

Drones.

But these are drones like you haven’t them seen before.

They’re not big or fast. They’re not armed with missiles or lasers. In fact, individually, they’re not very impressive at all.

These small, simple, cheap machines have one advantage over anything that came before them — and it’s an advantage that puts them on the next evolutionary rung of artificial intelligence and robotics development.

Called the LOCUST (Low-Cost UAV Swarm Technology), these devices can be launched rapidly and in large numbers from low-pressure air cannons mounted on ship decks.

The strength of these “swarming” drones isn’t in their individual ability but in their ability to work together.

Networked together with primitive artificial brains, these flying robots have the ability to act as a giant “super-organism” much in the same way fish and birds do when they travel in dense schools or flocks.

Incredibly, the computer-coded instincts these robots use to dictate their behavior is actually patterned after the instinctive behavior of certain animals.

Moving as a flock, for example, won’t be done through specific commands to each machine, but rather achieved through a hard-wired instinct to follow a leader.

In order to achieve complicated tasks such as traveling to a certain location and interacting with another object, this new generation of drone will employ “fuzzy logic” — which allows the machine to deduce a solution to a problem on its own rather than rely on specific instructions from a very long list of potential scenarios.

This allows for small, lightweight processors to achieve sophisticated behavior that would previously require much more computing power and far more intricate, bug-prone coding.

It may not seem like a big deal to anybody who’s not a confirmed tech geek, but imagining these things in action is where the real magic begins.

The Navy is already in the process of developing these swarming drones for exactly the sort of doomsday scenario a carrier group may face when attacked by a modern anti-ship missile.

Swarms can be deployed as a kind of smart, actively thinking screen around a ship.

Working together, they can be sent to either investigate or, if need be, actually block an intruder from getting too close to a fleet — something no bullet or missile can do.

Equipped with simple, lightweight sensors, these drones will be able to intercept potential threats at safe standoff distances, buying time for the crew to decide on a course of action.

Strength in Numbers

In a situation where a ballistic missile like the Chinese DF-21D has been launched and is determined to be heading towards a carrier group, screens of these cheap machines can be launched from an air cannon in large number, physically blocking the missile from completing the terminal stage of its descent.

With delicate guidance sensors and coming down at thousands of miles per hour, even slight contact with an unexpected obstacle would be an effective shield against a ballistic missile.

Small, smart, cheap, numerous, and autonomous, with only the most basic instructions required to perform tasks that would have overloaded a supercomputer just a few years back, this breed of drone promises to expand our definition of the robotics industry as a whole.

These machines are currently being tested by the Office of Naval Research — the most highly funded of all the “official” Department of Defense research agencies.

However, as the case has been with most of the current, cutting-edge, commercially available devices we live with today, it’s only a matter of time before the swarming drone starts to appear in a more civil context.

Given their relative simplicity and the power of modern wireless platforms — on which the majority of currently available civilian drones rely for control — you very well might see a drone swarm coming to a piece of sky near you before the end of next year.

It’s just another example of how the robotics industry is starting to infiltrate more layers of our lives.

As coding begins to give way to artificial instinct and small, fast computers grow smaller, faster, and more animal-like in their ability to think on the go, this infiltration is destined to take on forms that are hard to anticipate.

Fortune favors the bold,

Alex Koyfman

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