ONR to test swarming UAVs at sea next month

The U.S. Office of Naval Research has accumulated enough experience to bring its swarming UAV concept out to sea for testing next month.

The Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) – whereby approximately thirty Coyote unmanned aircraft systems are launched rapidly and flown together – will be launched from the Sea Fighter off the east coast of United States.

“”We’ll launch large numbers of them, doing swarm operations, flying around, doing a number of different flight profiles, then doing a land recovery,” Lee Mastroianni, ONR’s program manager for LOCUST, told Military.com.