DARPA's Semi-Disposable Gremlin Drones Will Fly by 2019

We first reported on Gremlins back in 2015, as one of those “DARPA wants” projects that seems like it might be a bit far-fetched—in this case, DARPA wanted swarms of nearly disposable UAVs that could launch and be retrieved from flying aircraft carrier motherships in mid-air. Over the last few years, we’ve seen some progress towards disposable drones, but the tricky part was always going to be the mid-air retrieval. We speculated a bit in our original post about how it might be done, but we didn’t get it quite right, which we know because DARPA has given a company called Dynetics a US $38.6 million contract to make Gremlins real.