3D-Printed Military Drone Takes Flight

 An update to the military mission to produce 3D-printed drones

Nicholas West
Activist Post

3D printing offers a range of potential benefits and open-source solutions to free humanity from centralized corporate and police state shackles. Naturally, the good elements are being fought tooth-and-nail, while the aberrant forms continue to be brought to us by the military-industrial complex as an essential security solution.

3D-printed military drones are now being explored, with some successes already being reported. In May of last year, Robo Raven (discussed below) was announced which incorporates 3D-printed components to produce independently flapping wings.

Now the Department of Defense has provided funding to the University of Virginia to develop the first fully 3D-printed UAV called the The Razor that can be created in less than a day with off-the-shelf parts and a smartphone running a customized flight-control app.

The latest (third) prototype is made of nine printed parts that click together like LEGO. The center of the plane is all one piece, with a removable hatch that offers access the inner cargo bay. All of the electronics live in there, including a Google Nexus 5 smartphone running a custom-designed avionics app that controls the plane, and an RC-plane autopilot that manages the control surfaces with input from the phone. The Razor’s wing structure is one piece, with an aileron, winglets, and mount for the small jet engine that clip on.

“This program was really tasked with showing what is possible.”

The aircraft, with a four-foot wingspan, weighs just 1.8 pounds. Loaded with all the electronics gear, it comes in at just under 6 pounds. That lets it fly at 40 mph for as long as 45 minutes, though the team’s working to get that up to an hour. An earlier prototype could top 100 mph, and the team believes the plane could hit 120 mph, at the cost of a very quickly drained battery.

As described, it could be used for almost continuous surveillance ecameras and sensors. 

It can carry 1.5 pounds, so attaching a camera to it would be no problem. The batteries take two hours to fully charge and are easily swapped out, so if you’ve got three or four packs on hand, the Razor can be in the air nearly continuously. The plane can be controlled from up to a mile away, or fly on its own using preloaded GPS waypoints to navigate.

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Here’s where the 3-D printing really comes in handy: The design can be modified—and reprinted—easily, to be bigger or smaller, carry a sensor or a camera, or fly slower or faster. The plane can be made in 31 hours, with materials that cost $800. Electronics (like the tablet-based ground station) push the price to about $2,500. That’s so cheap, it’s effectively disposable, especially since you can make another one anywhere you can put a 3-D printer. If one version is flawed or destroyed, you can just crank out another.

And crank them out, they will. As we also recently learned, drones with facial recognition are all set to go. And tiny A.I. humanoids are even being prepared to fly them. As time goes on, all of these technologies will merge into smaller and smaller applications, eventually hiding in plain sight. Meanwhile, the military is exploring other 3D-printing applications – from battlefield food supply to bombs to medicine.

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New 3D-Printed Drone Mimics Nature

The march toward developing drones that mimic nature continues unabated. Robobee has received a lot of attention lately for taking flight as a possible replacement pollinator for the declining natural bee population, while also offering the dual-use swarm surveillance and weapons’ capabilities sought after by the military.

The latest drone to come out of development utilizes 3D-printed components to produce a first of its kind: independently flapping wings. So effective is its mimicry, that product developers documented Robo Raven being attacked by a real hawk in the promo video below from Maryland Robotics Center: