The power of a movie drone

If these bionic weapons are put into actual combat, they may subvert future wars.

At the Russian "Military-2019" International Military Technology Forum, a Russian defense company exhibited a special "Snowy Owl" bionic drone reconnaissance aircraft. From the outside, this drone resembles a real snowy owl and has a certain camouflage and deception effect.

Some industry analysts pointed out that military technology occupies an important position in current bionic research. If these bionic weapons are put into actual combat, they may subvert future wars. Bionic, as the name suggests, is a model that imitates the shape of birds, bats or flying insects. Bionic drones mainly optimize the design appearance and internal structure of the drone through bionic to improve flight performance, thereby enhancing the environmental adaptability of the drone, which is an important direction for future drone research and development.

In fact, bionic weapons have shined more than once in the competition for human military technology. However, with the continuous development of technology, people have begun to despise or forget the inspiration given to us by natural creatures, but scientists who focus on new growth points in military technology will not let go of those "clues". Nowadays, breakthroughs in the development of basic science are not easy, and the development momentum of applied science is gradually lacking. Perhaps it is time for humans to "ask about" nature again.

From shallow to deep

In the early stages of human development, the means of cognition and observation of nature depended on their own physiological senses such as vision, touch, hearing, smell and taste. The internal laws and operating mechanism of natural phenomena are based on surface observation and guessing and imagination. Bionic design is mainly based on appearance and simple movement imitation, forming an appearance imitation method with primitive characteristics. With the emergence of observation methods and measurement equipment, human cognition breaks through the boundaries of the senses and then opens up a new depth in the field of bionics. For example, after the invention of microscope, people have gained a new understanding of the microstructure of things.
In addition to imitating the appearance characteristics, behavioral methods and survival methods of organisms, bionic weapons developers also hope to imitate relevant underlying movement laws and even strategies and tactics.

For example, in nature, once a bee encounters an invasion by foreign enemies, it will immediately emerge and rely on its numerous and flexible flight advantages to quickly siege the enemy. This tactic is also very similar to the wolf's attack tactics, and is called "bee swarm tactics" or "wolf pack tactics". The use of this tactic has shone brightly in the long river of human history.

During World War II, in order to deal with the Allied well-equipped escort fleet, the German submarine troops took advantage of the night to cover the cover and used the "wolf pack tactics" to carry out reconnaissance and search and rapid siege in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, which gave the Allied fleet a headache. From 1942 to 1943 alone, German submarines sank about 1,600 Allied ships through this tactic, and their own losses were less than 10%.

In modern times, new demands have been created for the use of drones because the cost of a single small drone is much lower than that of the current fast strike ammunition or conventional missiles, and can avoid injury to personnel and be recycled and reused. The US Navy regains swarm combat tactics, and the US Defense Grade Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed the "Denied Command Coordination in Environment" (CODE) project, which is to use short-term and rapid launch of low-cost drones to quickly achieve coordination and rapid offensive defense under information sharing conditions.

This distributed cluster attack model can not only greatly reduce combat costs, but also reduce casualties of large combat platforms and combatants. Therefore, the drone "swarm" technology is regarded by the US military as a "spreading technology" that can change the rules of the combat game.

In January 2018, the Syrian opposition launched 13 small drones carrying "immended explosive devices" to launch "swarm" attacks on the Khmeming Air Base and the Tartus Navy Supply Base in Syria. Although the drone's "swarm" attack technology level is low, all the spare parts and raw materials used are commercial drones, and the workmanship is rough; the attack scale of the drone's "swarm" is also relatively small, with only 13 small drones, but it still teaches all major military powers a lesson, and countries are speeding up their research on the "swarm" tactics.

In the battle between the United States and Iran, US Navy warships frequently crossed key maritime channels under the banner of "freedom of navigation", which is obviously a provocative act of showing off their force. Faced with provocation, Iran has studied the "drone swarm" tactic in recent years: it is necessary to send a large number of drones to fly over the Strait of Hormuz to maintain surveillance of the US military, and at the same time cooperate with a large number of missiles that have simple weapons and equipment but are quick to attack speedboats, thus making the US military afraid to use force against Iran easily.

At the same time, after the integrated modification of the large number of drones, they are actually very good firepower platforms. Due to its extremely low cost and no casualties, the large-scale use of armed drones can make the air defense system of the US fleet entering the Strait of Hormuz exhausted and unable to cope with saturated attacks. Faced with Iran's "drone swarm" tactic, the US military also lacks a good response.

This kind of scene is quite similar to the scene where the "King of Ten Thousand Beasts" seen in the animal world is tossed and rolled around by swarms of little bees, and there is no way to do anything about it, but it is definitely not without a solution.

The best way to deal with bees in nature is to destroy the hive or use another group of bees to target them. Coincidentally, facing the Iraqi army's "drone swarm" tactics, the US military said it plans to use the "drone swarm" tactics and direct ramming the drone command and control platform to counterattack.

Complex Change

However, with the development of artificial intelligence and the further strengthening of the command link, drones can automatically and spontaneously implement reconnaissance attacks after the innovation and transformation of artificial intelligence technology. The "drone swarm" tactics are zero-centered, and the so-called attack command and control platform will be targetless. At that time, another war demand will arise, which will in turn trigger a change in bionic weapons and bionic technologies.

Of course, bionic weapons imitate creatures more than just imitating wolves and bees tactics. For example, in modern warfare, in order to reduce or avoid collateral damage and reduce combat costs, the miniaturization of rapid guided munitions has become a development trend. However, miniaturized rapid guided munitions track faster moving targets. According to the old guidance law, the tracked target can easily escape the field of view of the guided munition seeker, so new guidance laws need to be found to make up for the shortcomings of the traditional guidance laws. In this regard, people turned their attention to the biological world again.

American biologists have discovered that during the tracking trajectory of dragonflies, whether in the plumb plane or in the horizontal plane, regardless of the initial position and body orientation of the dragonfly, near the target capture point, the body orientation of the dragonfly is close to the target movement direction, and during the tracking process, the fruit flies are basically maintained within 25 degrees of the dragonfly's field of view. This shows that when tracking the target, the dragonfly always wants to enter the target's capture point while chasing the target. If it is initially in the face-to-face state, it will quickly adjust its own state in the tracking initial section and then enter the tail-chasing mode.

Inspired by dragonflies, the researchers designed a bionic segmented composite guidance law for micro cruise missiles, which theoretically solved the problem of the target escaping from the seeker field of view. It has been simulated and has good results. I believe that this tiny ammunition will be seen on the battlefield in the near future.

Future vitality

When we use certain means to integrate camouflage technology with bionic technology to reach a level that is difficult to distinguish between true and false by the naked eye or detecting the naked eye, bionic weapons will be revitalized.

In recent years, with the rapid changes in the battlefield environment, a variety of relatively high-level intelligent machine recognition algorithms are gradually being applied in reconnaissance and intelligence processing. Traditional camouflage optical camouflage pattern design can no longer meet the camouflage requirements. Researchers are studying the basic mechanism of biological genetic evolution, hoping to use genetic algorithms to perform bionic processing such as optimal copying, cross-breeding and mutant reproduction on camouflage patterns, improve traditional camouflage pattern design methods, and improve the camouflage effect.

Imagine one day, a group of migrating geese flew over the border of a certain country. Among the geese that are sometimes lined up in a cross, there is a bionic geese that is so realistic that it can deceive the real geese. The wild goose flew across the border, sometimes hovering over the tense military base, sometimes stopping to stand on the branches and basking in the sun (replenishing energy).

Near the military base, several simulated "birds" walked out of the belly of the "geese": the fly set out from here and flew into the base's office through sewer pipes and vents to complete the mission it should complete; a "bird" stood on the power line of large equipment, and made a beautiful arc between the live line and the neutral line. With a "bang", all the power was damaged; a pigeon suddenly appeared on the runway where the military plane was about to take off, making the plane's pilot frightened.

This is similar to the scenes that we can only appear in movies and cartoons, and if they become reality, it will surprise you. It is reported that the more technologically technological bionic drone "carrier pigeon" developed by the relevant countries has the shape and movement of the real pigeon, and has been tested in practice. The new drone monitors ground personnel from the air, and ground personnel will only think that ordinary birds are flying above them.

Similar to Russia's "Snow Owl" bionic drone, in the future, this type of bionic drone can deceive the enemy's naked eye to identify and detect with a realistic appearance, and can also avoid the reconnaissance of the enemy's radar and other detection technologies, and can mix into ordinary birds to flew into the enemy's military forbidden zone. In this way, simulated weapons will play an important role in jungle areas, border patrols, relatively original reconnaissance, urban street fighting, special operations and other scenarios.

With the continuous development of cutting-edge technologies, scenes similar to those seen in science fiction blockbusters will appear on the battlefield one after another, and various bionic weapons that are both "both in form and spirit" will be revitalized in the future.

Article source | Drone