Every UASFeed story on DARPA — across defense, counter-UAS, industry, commercial, policy, and tech, newest first.
A taxonomy of the drone-mothership concept across air, sea, and ground domains — from robotic combat vehicles and containerized launchers to submarine tenders — and why range-stacking and cost asymmetry are reshaping every branch of warfare.
Read the story →DARPA has grown its Lift Challenge to 124 teams from 20+ countries, setting up a $6.5 million heavy vertical-lift flyoff at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, August 2-9, with public finals August 6-9.
DARPA's $3.37M "Rads to Watts" award puts Morgan State University in charge of turning Strontium-90 nuclear waste into radiovoltaic power cells aimed at giving drones and satellites decades of untethered flight.
A Morgan State-led team is building SYMPHONEE, a Strontium-90 radiovoltaic cell under a $3.37M DARPA contract, targeting over 10 W/kg and decades of unattended power for drones and remote systems.
Russian electronic warfare can blank GPS within 5 kilometers of deployment. Shield AI’s president says 99% of military autonomous systems fail under jamming. The solution — running perception, navigation, and targeting entirely on the drone — is now combat-proven.
Optionally piloted aircraft hold manned airworthiness certificates while enabling fully autonomous operations—closing the regulatory gap that stalls pure UAVs. From proven Afghan cargo resupply missions to DARPA’s autonomous Black Hawk delivered to the Army in 2026, the concept reshapes military logistics and aviation.
Drone light shows and true autonomous swarms share an airspace but almost nothing else. The decentralized MANET/FANET mesh—multi-hop routing, anti-jamming MARL, GPS-denied positioning—is what separates choreography from genuine collective autonomy, and what DARPA OFFSET and Replicator's $1B are chasing.
Every VTOL aircraft must reconcile two contradictory physics demands: hover requires high blade area and tip speed, while forward flight requires the opposite. Tilt-rotor, tailsitter, and ducted-fan architectures each place their bets differently — with lasting consequences for military range and noise compliance.
Shield AI's Hivemind AI pilot stack has been in continuous combat use since 2018 — from SOCOM building clearances to Ukraine ISR sorties to a live F-16 dogfight with the Air Force Secretary on board.
Air-launched effects (ALE) divorce mission risk from platform cost by stacking a mothership's standoff range on top of a drone's own reach — letting aircraft dispense swarms deep inside defended airspace without entering it. From DARPA's Gremlins to China's Jiutian, the concept is going mainstream.
Russian jamming dropped FPV hit rates from 40–60% to under 30%. Ukraine's response accelerated every GPS-denied navigation technique in the book — from inertial sensors and visual odometry to quantum magnetometers and $50 autonomy modules. Here's how each layer works.
Most formations called 'drone swarms' aren't—they're centralized fleets, scripted salvos, or teleoperated aircraft. Here's what true swarm autonomy requires, which programs are closest, and why C2 software remains the binding constraint.
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