AeroVironment launches new Mayhem drone product line

AeroVironment on Wednesday unveiled Mayhem 10, the first in a new product line of unmanned aerial systems that the company plans to market to the Army and other potential customers.

Best known for its Switchblade family of kamikaze drones or loitering munitions, AeroVironment describes its new platform as an “autonomous, multi-role launched effects system” with payload flexibility that allows it to perform precision strike, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), electronic warfare, or communications relay missions.

The system has a payload capacity of 10 pounds, cruise speed of 80 miles per hour, dash speed of 120-plus miles per hour, 50 minutes endurance and a range of 100 kilometers, according to a product fact sheet.

The Group 2 UAS can be launched from air, ground and maritime platforms and was designed to be resistant to jamming, spoofing and anti-navigation methods, according to the company.

Brian Young, AeroVironment’s senior vice president for loitering munitions, said AV partnered with Applied Intuition on efforts to give the system “collaborative attack” capabilities, also known as swarming.

During a call with reporters ahead of the official product announcement, Young told DefenseScoop that the AI-enabled swarming tech has been tested in lab settings and will eventually be put through its paces with hardware for the military.

“Certainly in the lab, all of those algorithms … have been actively tested with Applied Intuition. In terms of, have we gotten, you know, mass effects in the air all at the same time doing that? No, we’re at the beginning of this program right now. So certainly, have simulated all of that, and it represents what would happen in the real world. When you start getting hardware and you want to get 10 in the air, it does get extremely expensive. And that’s OK. So we will look to partner with the Army and others in building out those tests, not necessarily just because of cost,” Young said.

He continued: “It’s like, well, what do you really want to do here? I think we get the question of, do you do swarming? Well … I like the term collaborative attack better, but the idea is, swarming is a capability. What mission do you want to complete? And then the algorithms we have either out of the box or could be modified to do that collaborative autonomy and collaborative attack all at once. So I really want our customers to tell us that, we build that into the system, and then we’ll go out and show you we can do it. So the important part is the underlying hardware and I’ll call it the operating system in Mayhem 10 are already there to do all of those things. And that’s what I’m kind of talking about today. But yes, we will test those things with real hardware in the future. [But] it’s all in the lab at this point.”

AV also partnered with Parry Labs to develop a modular open systems architecture for Mayhem, according to Young.

“We’re building the playground, the operating system that allows all these third parties that are now in the defense tech world to utilize their algorithms, their automatic target recognition, their visual-based navigation, any of those types of next-generation algorithms to be hosted on our hardware and be integrated with the sensors and systems on the launched effect,” he told reporters.

The Mayhem 10 will be in low-rate initial production this year, Young said, adding that when the company eventually gets to full-rate production, it could crank out hundreds of platforms or more per month.

The hardware is similar to the Switchblade 400, he noted.

“We’ll be in LRIP this calendar year. And then … based on the backlog in demand, we’ll be ramping that pretty aggressively for both Mayhem 10 and Switchblade 400,” he told reporters.

The company hasn’t secured any orders yet from the Defense Department for the new Mayhem system, but the company is eyeing the Army — which is moving to ramp up its drone arsenal — and other military components as potential customers, according to Young.

“We’re just kind of announcing it [now] and getting it out there. We do have, like I said, very strong customer relationships in this community. So, we’ve been talking about the capability with those customers for a while and certainly see paths to orders across many different customers not too long from now. But this is the initial launch,” he said.

Young didn’t provide an estimate for the price of the system, saying it would depend on the configuration and the quantity purchased.

Meanwhile, the company is already pondering future variants of Mayhem.

“We’ve already started talking about, you know, a Mayhem 20 and other things and scaling this,” Young said. “The way the system was developed, I talked about modularity. It’s also built to scale, physically scale, not just production scale. And so bigger variants, potentially smaller variants, but bigger variants as well, depending on customer need. You know the [Army’s] Launched Effects program has built in different-sized systems into its requirements, right? So you have short range, medium range and long range within that. And so we look at kind of that entire set of capabilities specifically for the Army. But then even outside of that, as being able to branch out into the future, much like Switchblade did, going from Switchblade 300 to 600 and then 400, you know you’d see a similar build out of Mayhem products.”