The US Army is looking to the future and its researchers are trying to build solar-powered winged vehicles for combat and surveillance. The new combat aircrafts will destroy the enemy target without any damage to the environment (if that’s possible) and they will also prevent the army from destroying friendly or non-hostile targets.

The solar-powered aircrafts are called Swarming Micro Air Vehicles, or SMAV, and they will create a network which leads to SMAVNET Project at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland. SMAVNET stands for Swarming Micro Air Vehicle Networks for Communication Relay, and the Micro Autonomous Science and Technology Center will test this technique.

The MAST Center from the US Army Research Lab is working together with the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania and with BAE Systems. All of these will try and develop SMAVs for a period of five years and if all goes according to the plan they will continue their research for five more years.

“A networked swarm can co-ordinate through sensing, communication and mobility to form a virtual “super-organism” composed of a number of flying…vehicles that can penetrate any structure and find targets of interest,” said professor and chairman Darryll Pines, at the Maryland Aerospace Engineering Department.

Professor Pines and his team will try two different approaches in developing SMAV’s behavior and they have a good starting point thanks to the SMAVNET Project which is based on communication between the solar-powered birds in order to gather as much information as possible about the surroundings.

As I aforementioned, the US Army researchers will design the behavior of the SMAV using two different approaches, one which will be based on artificial evolution to create the controllers and the other one is to use the searching capability of the army ants which create pheromone paths in order to find food.

This project is only at the beginning and for the moment they US Army didn’t give too much details, however, I don’t expect them to do so as we don’t want the enemies to get their hands on this technology.

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