hunt

The entire U.S. military is now pushing to acquire hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new drones, especially smaller types, in the coming years, spurred on by new direction from the Pentagon. In turn, a demand for new containerized launchers capable of rapidly deploying and, if need be, recovering those uncrewed aerial systems has now emerged. On several occasions in the past, TWZ has called attention to the value of exactly these kinds of launch capabilities, for use on land and at sea, especially for employing fully networked swarms.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) laid out broad requirements for what it referred to as a Containerized Autonomous Drone Delivery System (CADDS). DIU’s central focus is on leveraging new and improved commercial-off-the-shelf technologies to help meet U.S. military needs.

“The Department of War (DoW) faces a robotic mass challenge: current methods for deploying and sustaining unmanned aerial systems (UAS) rely on direct human interaction to launch, recover, and refit each system,” the CADDS notice explains. “This 1:1 operator-to-aircraft model limits deployment speed and scale while exposing operators to unnecessary risks.”

The “problem” to solve then is that “the DoW requires the ability to deploy large quantities of UAS rapidly, while minimizing the risk and burden to human operators executing kinetic and non-kinetic UAS operations in contested environments,” it adds.

To that end, “DOW seeks innovative solutions that enable the storage, rapid deployment, and management of multi-agent systems to provide either persistent UAS coverage over extended periods or massed effects within a single geographic region and time,” per DIU. It needs to be “employable from land and maritime platforms, in both day and night conditions, and during inclement weather.”

These have to be “designs [that] can be transported by military or commercial vehicles (land, sea, air)” and that “can be quickly positioned and made operational with minimal handling or setup.” They also have to be able to provide “automated functions for drone storage, launching, recovering, and refitting within the containerized platform; the intent is for the system to exist in a dormant state for a period of time and launch UAS upon command.”

DIU does not name any particular drones that the CADDS has to be able to accommodate or say how many UASs a single launcher should be able to hold. The notice does say the system will need to support “homogeneous and heterogeneous mixes of Government-directed UAS.”

The launch system also has to be capable of being set up and broken back down in a time frame measured in minutes and have a small operational footprint. “Ideally, the system should require a crew of no more than 2 personnel,” per DIU.

When it comes to the “autonomous” element of the launch system, DIU says it needs to support “both operator-on-the-loop and operator-in-the-loop decision-making processes.”

The market space for containerized launchers for various payloads, and for use on land and at sea, has been steadily growing globally in recent years. There has already been a further trend in the development of such systems for launching loitering munitions and other uncrewed aerial systems, or the adaptation of existing designs to be able to do so.

As one example, in the past year or so, Northrop Grumman has begun touting the ability of what it is currently calling the Modular Payload System (MPS) to launch drones, as seen in the computer-generated video below. TWZ was first to report on the development of that system all the way back in 2018, when it was being presented solely as a way to surface-launch variants of the AGM-88 anti-radiation missile. MPS is also now being pitched as a launcher for the Advanced Reactive Strike Missile (AReS), a surface-to-surface missile derived from the AGM-88G Advanced Anti-radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range (AARGM-ER) and its Stand-in Attack Weapon (SiAW) cousin.

Modular Payload System: Launching from Land or Sea

Last year, another concept for a containerized launcher capable of holding up to 48 drones at once also emerged from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan. Back in 2024, Germany’s Rheinmetall and UVision in Israel had also unveiled two very similar designs, specifically for launching members of the latter company’s Hero series of loitering munitions.

This is just a small selection of the designs that have been seen to date. Firms in China have been particularly active in this regard, and developments in that country have often also been tied to work on swarming capabilities.

中国电科陆空协同固定翼无人机“蜂群”系统

中国电科大规模无人机蜂群任务全流程试验

Container-like launchers for uncrewed aerial systems, often mounted on trucks, have already been in service in many countries for years. This includes Iran, where they are used to launch Shahed-type kamikaze drones, as can be seen in the video below.

Баражуючий іранський боєприпас «Shahed 136»

However, many of these systems are focused squarely on the launch aspect and lack the recovery and refit capabilities that DIU has outlined for CADDS. Chinese drone firm DJI and others in the commercial space are increasingly offering container-like ‘docks,’ but which are often designed to accommodate just one uncrewed aerial system at a time.

What is particularly interesting here is how many of the stated CADDS requirements actually sound very similar, at least in very broad strokes, to a containerized system capable of launching, recovering, and recharging thousands of small, electrically-powered quadcopter-type drones at the touch of a button that the Chinese company DAMODA rolled out last year. That launcher, dubbed the Automated Drone Swarm Container System, is for drone light shows for entertainment purposes rather than military use.

Behind the Scenes of DAMODA Automated Drone Swarm Container System.✨

China just dropped a new level of drone swarm tech | One-click auto-deploy of thousands | by DAMODA

Still, as we previously wrote:

It is worth reiterating that DAMODA’s Automated Drone Swarm Container System, at least as it exists now, is clearly designed for entertainment industry use first and foremost. Though the company’s drone light show routines are certainly visually impressive and often go viral on social media, they are pre-scripted and conducted in a very localized fashion. What the company is offering is not a drone swarm capable of performing various military-minded tasks in a highly autonomous manner at appreciable ranges from its launch point.

At the same time, large-scale drone light shows put on by DAMODA (and a growing number of other companies), do highlight, on a broad level, the already highly problematic threats posed by swarms. The new Automated Drone Swarm Container System underscores the additional danger of these same threats hiding in plain sight. The steady proliferation of advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially when it comes to dynamic targeting, will only create additional challenges, as TWZ has explored in detail in this past feature.

This is not theoretical, either. As mentioned, in June [2025], Ukrainian forces launched multiple drone attacks on airbases across Russia with the help of covert launchers loaded on the back of unassuming civilian tractor-trailer trucks. This entire effort was dubbed Operation Spiderweb and took months of planning.

Even in an overt operational context, readily deployable containerized systems capable of acting as hubs for drone operations across a broad area with limited manpower requirements could offer a major boost in capability and capacity. Ships, trucks, and aircraft, which could themselves be uncrewed, could be used to bring them to and from forward locations, even in remote areas. If they can support a “heterogeneous mix” of uncrewed aerial systems, a single container could be used to support a wide array of mission requirements, including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, electronic warfare, kinetic strikes, and/or communications signal relay.

An inherent benefit of a drone swarm, in general, is that each individual component does not have to be configured to perform all of the desired tasks. This creates additional flexibility and resilience to threats, since the loss of any particular drone does not necessarily preclude the swarm from continuing its assigned missions. There are tangential design and cost benefits for the drones themselves, since they can be configured to carry only the systems required for their particular mission demands.

Army Aviation Launches Autonomous Pack Hunters

TWZ previously laid out a detailed case for the many benefits that could come along with loading containers packed with swarms of drones onto U.S. Navy ships. Many of those arguments are just as relevant when talking about systems designed to be employed on land. Containerized systems are often readily adaptable to both ground-based and maritime applications, to begin with.

Drone swarms are only set to become more capable as advancements in autonomy, especially automated target recognition, continue to progress, driven by parallel developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as you can read more about here. Future highly autonomous swarms will be able to execute various mission sets even more efficiently and in ways that compound challenges for defenders. Massed drone attacks with limited autonomy already have an inherent capacity to just overwhelm enemy defenses. In turn, electronic warfare systems and high-power microwave directed energy weapons have steadily emerged as some of the most capable options available to tackle swarms, but have their own limitations. Even powerful microwave systems have very short ranges and are directional in nature, and electronic warfare systems may simply not work at all against autonomous drones.

In terms of what DIU is now looking at for CADDS, the stated requirements are broad. It remains to be seen what options might be submitted, let alone considered for actual operational U.S. military use.

Still, DIU has laid out a real emerging capability gap amid the current push to field various tiers of drones to a degree never before seen across America’s armed forces, which counterinsurgency launch systems look well-positioned to fill.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

ST. PAUL, Minn., Jan. 30 (UPI) — One of the longest-running searches for extraterrestrial life is coming to end this year as U.S. scientists wrap up a popular program that enlisted millions of home computer users to analyze radio signals received from space.

After years poring through immense amounts of generated data, the program’s co-founders at the University of California at Berkeley told UPI this week they are probing 100 detected signals deemed to be the best candidates for messages from “ET” before the effort is wrapped up for good, 27 years after it was launched.

But even though the “SETI@home” project has so far failed to record a “first contact” from an alien civilization, its leaders say valuable lessons have been learned that can be applied to the continuing hunt for beyond Earth.

SETI@home, short for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was launched in 1999 by scientists at UC Berkeley who over the course of two-plus decades enlisted more than 5 million “crowdsourced” volunteers willing to donate their home computers’ processing capacity to analyze data generated by momentary energy blips picked up by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

It was one of the pioneering efforts at distributed computing in an era before supercomputers and high-speed Internet connections. Under the project, home users downloaded and installed free software that could pick out signals deemed to be “ET” candidates from raw data supplied by the 1,000-foot radio telescope at Arecibo, which collapsed in 2020

The observatory was damaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and rebuilt, but it met its end a little more than three years later because filled spelter sockets that anchored the massive support cables had been undergoing long-term chemical and mechanical degradation.

The data was collected over a period of 14 years and covered almost the entire sky visible to the telescope as its operators performed other tasks, such as mapping solar system bodies and discovering pulsars.

From its data, the home computer users ultimately produced 12 billion detections. The vast majority turned out to be radio frequency interference from man-made sources, such as satellites and earthbound radio and television broadcasts, but researchers for years continued to doggedly plow through the possibilities.

Billions of “candidate” radio signals narrowed to final 100

Project co-founder David Anderson of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory said he and his team spent a decade narrowing down that massive list to 1 million candidates and then to a final 100, which are now being investigated using China’s 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, also known as FAST, in hopes of finding them again.

And after that’s completed, the long-running program will officially be a wrap, in part because it has now reached point of diminishing scientific returns.

“The output of the first two phases of SETI@home were millions of what we call signal candidates, which are basically collections of momentary bursts of energy from the same place in the sky at about the same frequency, but possibly spread over many years,” Anderson told UPI.

“And of course, there was a lot of work involved in removing the man-made interference from from these things and ranking them, because at some point we had to go through them and manually inspect the signal candidates to get rid of the ones that are obviously interference.

“A lot of that we could do by using computer algorithms we developed, but in the end, we had to look at these signals ourselves.”

To guide the development of those algorithms, Anderson and his team used artificial candidates, or “birdies,” that modeled persistent ET signals within a range of power and bandwidth parameters. The birdies were introduced blindly, allowing the team to gauge how sensitive their detection system was.

The only reason they were able to generate the initial billions of candidate signals was due to the small processors provided the home-based volunteers, whose response at the start of effort in the late ’90s was overwhelming, Anderson said.

“Whether there is extraterrestrial life is kind of the most important unanswered scientific question at this point, and so I think we knew that we’d get some users,” he said. “We banked on, I think, 50,000 people initially, which we thought we’d need to keep up with the stream of data from Arecibo.

“We got a lot of national media coverage at right at the beginning, and within the first year we had close to 1 million participants. We actually had to scramble to figure out ways to use that surplus of computing power effectively.”

UC Berkeley research astronomer Eric Korpela, another co-founder of the program, said he felt a keen “sense of accomplishment” with SETI@home, both in the sense of technical achievements — such as in vastly increasing the sensitivity of signal detection over existing spectroscopic methods — and in how it demonstrated the intensity of worldwide public interest in the search for ET.

“We encountered a lot of resistance from the SETI community when we first started started this,” he told UPI. “Whenever you start a project with a large public-facing component, there’s always the fear in a lot of peoples’ minds that you are going to do something wrong and you’re going to turn people off the entire field.

“But, of course, I think that wasn’t the case. Instead, this really engaged the public imagination, and I don’t think that we’re necessarily done with that. Someone could again tap into that sense of fascination that people have about the search for extraterrestrial life.”

Many people still want to have a connection to this sort of science, Korpela said, adding, “I think that is really a large part of our legacy.”

Others praise, assess impact of SETI@home

Other researchers and organizations deeply involved in the search for extraterrestrial life also praised the accomplishments and legacy of SETI@home as it wraps up its mission.

One of them is the National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, trailblazers in radio astronomy and operators of Breakthrough Listen, described as the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth.

Observatory public information officer Jill Malusky noted that her organization and UC Berkeley’s SETI Research Center worked together on SETI@home, and that its winding down won’t sever that relationship.

“The NSF NRAO/GBO are big supporters of citizen science projects, and we’re excited about the impact of SETI@home’s legacy through the tireless work of its volunteers, and for the public recognition SETI can bring to efforts like these,” she told UPI.

“The search for techno-signatures and extraterrestrial life is a very exciting part of the scientific research that the NSF NRAO’s telescopes can do — and it’s one of the accessible areas for the public to understand.”

Most staffers who work at the West Virginia observatories were drawn there “by the same curiosity we all have when we look up at the universe — are we the only ones here? Is anyone else out there?” she said.

“While what we find with our telescopes may not be as dramatic as we hope, like a sci-fi movie, it’s still exciting to have our work overlap with the search.”

Similarly, prominent astrobiologist and SETI researcher Douglas Vakoch said SETI@home revolutionized the search for life in the universe by solving one of the greatest challenges of looking for intelligence in space, and that by doing so “directly inspired a new generation of researchers who are attempting first contact by sending powerful radio messages to the stars.”

Vakoch is president of METI International, a nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, and editor of many academic works in several fields.

He told UPI that SETI@home was a breakthrough in that it was able to combine “mainstream astronomy” with the search for extraterrestrials, which researchers must “constantly struggle to justify” as they seek precious telescope time.

“With SETI@home, scientists did both,” Vakoch said. “As astronomers pointed the Arecibo radio telescope at targets of their choice, SETI@home also analyzed the incoming data, but this time for signals that can’t be created by nature. SETI@home was designed so scientists could conduct mainstream astronomy and simultaneously determine whether we’re alone in the universe.”

in that way, instead of becoming an obstacle to astronomers seeking time on the world’s largest radio telescope, SETI@home “helped foster public support and recognition for space science.”

Its greatest legacy, he said, is that it is now “guiding the next generation of interstellar communication,” including Vakoch’s own METI project, which rather than listening for radio signals from space as SETI does, reverses the process by sending powerful radio signals to nearby stars in the hope of eliciting a response from an advanced civilization.

Despite thus far coming away empty-handed in the search for ET, the SETI@home project nonetheless provided many valuable insights, Anderson said.

“It was a ‘whole sky’ project that covered the everything visible from Arecibo, and there’s there’s a lot of technical things that we did, some of which were right and others we would do differently if we had to go back,” he said.

“So we learned a lot of lessons about how to do radio astronomy, and we published two papers last year describing them.”

He added that the powerful distributed computing system established for SETI@home can be used in the future for research in related areas such as cosmology and pulsars, or even for medical research.