Page 40 - GCN, April/May 2018

case study UNMANNED SYSTEMS Using drones to deliver
supplies to warfighters
The Hive Final Mile project uses a mobile application to place orders for automated resupply in the field
BY MATT LEONARD
Marine reservist Maj. Christo- pher Thobaben came up with the idea for an automated system for delivering supplies to troops. He sent a rough sketch to a friend, who told him to make it official.
“I was very critical of Marine Corps logistics and our innovation since World War II,” Thobaben said. For more than a half-century, “we basically just made the horse faster.”
His idea for moving supply delivery to drones was demonstrated in March at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Va. The Hive Final Mile project consists of a mo- bile application for placing orders, an au- tomated drone launcher (the Hive), soft- ware for determining what drone to fly and managing flight paths, and a cloud storage component for keeping track of all the flights and orders.
Everything starts with an Android tablet. Kyle Aron, an engineer at Soar Technology, helped build a plugin for the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK), a mapping application developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Army Research Laboratory and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Users place orders via the app for ammu- nition, a tourniquet, water or any other available item that can be delivered by drone. Then they specify the drop-off lo- cation and other variables.
ATAK sends the request to Sentien Robotics’ Shepherd software, which au- tomates parts of the process. First, it de- cides what kind of drone to send. If troops need an eye in the sky, for example, it will send a drone outfitted with a camera. If
medics need an order of insulin, Shep- herd will send a drone that can deliver medical supplies.
AUTOMATING DRONE MISSIONS
For the Hive Final Mile demonstration,
40 GCN APRIL/MAY 2018 • GCN.COM
PHOTOS: MATT LEONARD