Army and Marines Developing On-Demand 3-D Printed Drones

DooKey

DooKey

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The Army and Marines have teamed up to develop a new drone technology that allows them to 3-D print a custom drone close to the edge of the battlefield. The plan is to have a catalog of different drones available and then the soldier/marine selects what he needs for the mission and then begins to print it out. Additionally, these drones will be modular and they can even print out different components to make a custom drone for a special kind of mission need. I believe this is a great leap forward for our military and should help our warfighters tremendously going forward. They won't have to wait for something to be moved up from the rear or even from state-side once this is fielded.

Spero and his team brought their idea to fruition at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command's annual event at Fort Benning, Georgia in 2016. The Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment, or AEWE, puts new technologies in the the hands of Soldiers.
 
This has been coming for a long time. That said, it's not exactly going to be fast. Something like 1-5 hours to print a single part, and some parts cannot be printed very effectively. Unless you have entire buildings full of these printers dedicated to building them it's not really that much of an advantage. Even then, that probably isn't going to happen at a fob near you...
 
So what about all the parts that can’t be 3D printed? What about the wiring and the assembly ... it’s not going to be fast
 
They've already done the 3D printed aspect of this. It isn't difficult.

Perdix Swarm Drone.

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The noise these drones make is terrifying. It's straight out of a horror movie. If you were witness to these things in person, you could imagine at any second they start going Hitchcock and they dive bomb you like a swarm of seagulls.


The difficult part will be the "on-demand" aspect of this. The way this press release reads it sounds like they want to develop a way for a soldier to pick the parts for the drone for the mission then have them 3D printed on demand. The problem is, even the most expensive printers on the planet are not relatively fast. You're still talking hours before something is done printing.

They are better off 3D printing a bunch of spare parts ahead of time, setting up the modular system of setup, then letting someone assemble them like a model kit when they need the drone.
 
Well if they can print at the field base before a mission a task built unit to say.. carry a camera and a small charge to place appropriately.. then they can have it for a specific mission. It's better than.. "We want a drone to do X,."
"Ok we've requested he drone be built and shipped to us after design and development it will be 12 million dollars and be here in 2 years."
 
Seems like it would make far more sense to have a bunch of parts lying around, or lift in drones if you really need them
 
And here we see "3d Printing" trying to make its case for replacing "Cloud" as the free space in Buzzword Bingo...


3d printing has plenty of applications. Rapid prototyping? Perfect. Limited-run custom parts? Cool. Tens-to-hundreds of thousands of units in order to outfit an entire military branch at the squad level? Hold on there, son...

"Customization"? All you need is a handful of drone chassis styles with standardized hardpoints for instruments and tools. It's LEGO with a remote control. Instead, you'd be trading a crate of R/C LEGO for an even larger crate of fragile, fiddly, unreliable 3d printing gear.


This isn't someone trying to sell 3d printed drones. This is someone trying to get that sweet, sweet military-industrial complex cost-plus payola for making 3d printers.
 
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