The Marine Corps is looking for medium-sized cargo drones to handle supply missions across the far-flung islands of the Pacific. One company hopes its acquisition of a drone from an uncrewed-logistics pioneer will put it in the running.
On Tuesday, Piasecki Aircraft Corporation announced it had acquired Kaman Air Vehicles’ KARGO program, a medium-lift drone that fits in a standard trailer and can lift a 500-pound payload for long distances, or a 1,000-pound payload for short missions of about 100 nautical miles, said President and CEO John Piasecki. But those numbers will likely change as the Marines examine their resupply needs more fully.
The Army and the Marines both need a variety of cargo drone types and payloads, from relatively small ones that only travel short distances to what Piasecki called medium-range drones, capable of carrying 500- to 800-pound payloads, as well as even heavier-duty ones. The Marines are discussing the tradeoffs of extending the payload requirement to 1,400 pounds, he said.
“It’s all [in] flux, and so we’ll see how the Marine Corps requirements evolve,” Piasecki said.
Distance isn’t the only challenge the Marines face in the Pacific. There’s also component parts, food, fuel and other supplies—the sorts of supply missions where sending human helicopter pilots out is costly and risky, relative to the cargo. It’s also an area other drone companies haven’t been focused on, he said.
“We think we could generate more value to the end-customer in these missions where we were relieving high-value assets, helicopter assets,” running resupply missions that shouldn’t require a human pilot or an expensive helicopter.
Kaman has long been in the business of trying to roboticize cargo delivery for the military. It achieved a big first in 2011 with the flight of a remote-controlled heavy lift helicopter, the K-Max, in Afghanistan. Despite the success, the K-Max never became a program of record, as Marine Corps needs changed and the limited autonomy was a problem.
Autonomy has come a long way since, reducing the need for a human remote controller, Piasecki said. But more importantly, the modular design of the KARGO and the digital backbone will allow for the platform to become a better pilot as technology and data advance, without big re-designs.
Another factor that makes the project more feasible now, he said, is that the commercial market has demanded it in fields like mining and oil, where workers in remote places such as off-shore oil rigs have few solutions to get important resupplies and parts.
The Marine Corps and the Army are also both trying to shift to smaller, more disaggregated units and away from large formations, which are increasingly easy to target. KARGO-sized drones could help.
“The Marines have identified vertical-lift logistics as a key strategic focus area, because they see it as critical enabling capability for distributed operations.”
Kaman demonstrated one of the two prototypes to the Marine Corps last summer and to the Army last fall, he said.
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