By Jim Morris, Warrior Vice President, News
The Pentagon has given six companies the go-ahead to move to the next stage of development for an unmanned “X-plane” for the ANCILLARY project.
The project’s goal is to increase small vertical takeoff and landing uncrewed aircraft system capabilities. ANCILLARY, run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, calls for aircraft that can be launched and recovered from Navy ships without the large launchers and landing equipment used today.
The companies selected to move to the next phase of the project are AeroVironment, Griffon Aerospace, Karem Aircraft, Method Aeronautics, Northrop Grumman and Sikorsky. During the ten-month development period, the companies will, among other things, conduct component and configuration hover testing.
DARPA’s ANCILLARY project, called AdvaNced airCraft Infrastructure-Less Launch And RecoverY program, seeks to engineer a first-of-its kind ship-launched, vertical take-off-and-landing drone able to reach unprecedented endurance and, as DARPA explains it in an essay, “create beyond-line-of-sight multi-intelligence sensor network capability.” In terms of its concept of operation, ANCILLARY appears to seek the ability to operate in an expeditionary manner in high-risk, forward, austere maritime or land combat environments in a networked, long-endurance capacity without needing “additional infrastructure equipment.”
At the end of the time, contractors will submit proposals for design, fabrication and flight testing. X-plane flight tests are expected to start in early 2026.
“A network of these small UAS can be launched from a ship to provide beyond-line-of-sight F2T2 (find, fix, track, target) of surface vessels of interest for the ship commander, “ Steve Komandina, DARPA program manager for ANCILLARY, said in a DARPA essay. “While we anticipate this effort is most likely to support Navy and Marine missions, we have found other services are very interested in the capabilities this technology can bring.”
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Earlier this month, the Pentagon selected one of the companies involved in the ANCILLARY program, AeroVironment, for its first iteration of the Replicator drone-swarm system. The company builds the Switchblade 600, a man-portable drone equipped with an anti-armor warhead.
Switchblade drones have already proven successful in Ukraine. The drone’s guidance system and loitering abilities have been upgraded to provide additional target tracking capability to US forces.
The Replicator system involves groups of drones, operating with varying levels of autonomy and artificial intelligence-enabled computing.
According to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, the initial manufacturing is designed to expedite several key concepts of operation, including destroying enemy drones, operating on the ocean’s surface and simply flying from various host platforms.
The tactical elements of the Replicator system are described by Pentagon weapons developers in terms of “All-Domain-Attributable-Autonomy (ADA2)”. That’s a concept the advances the use of low-cost, networked and coordinated groups of unmanned systems conducting missions across multiple domains.
