Air Force Gets Ambitious with Yearlong Test of Autonomous Cargo Craft

Fresh off its biggest test yet of an autonomous cargo plane, the Air Force is going bolder: deploying and operating another such aircraft for an entire year. 

Startup Reliable Robotics announced last month that it has reached a $17.4 million deal to adapt a Cessna 208B for the mission. The aircraft is rated to carry around 3,000 pounds as far as 1,000 nautical miles. 

“We’re going to buy an aircraft, we’re going to outfit it with our reliable autonomy system, and then we’re going to give it to the Air Force,” retired Maj. Gen. David O’Brien, senior vice president of government solutions at the firm, told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “And they’re going to operate it for nominally about a year, doing some test and evaluation. The expectation is they’ll probably be in the Pacific theater, because that seems to make the most sense, and they’ll get used to it.” 

Meanwhile, Joby Aviation announced its autonomous flight technology flew more than 40 hours and 7,000 miles during the Air Force’s Resolute Force Pacific exercise, also using a Cessna Caravan 208. 

Joby officials called it a “first-of-its-kind demonstration,” and Lt. Col. Jonathan Gilbert, from the Air Force’s innovation arm AFWERX, said Resolute Force Pacific was “an opportunity to demonstrate the technology in a realistic environment and highlight the potential impact of these autonomous systems. The lessons learned from this exercise participation are vital to guiding our focus as we continue development of affordable technologies that support the needs of our Airmen.” 

Now, Reliable is hoping to go even further. Over the next year, O’Brien said, the company will purchase the Cessna and install its Reliable Autonomy System—a combination of software, wiring, computers, and actuators that will all be configured to maximize cargo capacity. After that, it will hand the aircraft over to the Air Force and be available to lend support as the service experiments with the airframe. 

“They’ll operate it for about a year or more, and then we’ll see what happens after that,” O’Brien said. “But yeah, we’re hopeful that they’ll see the utility in the aircraft, that they’ll want more aircraft, more time, more operational locations to fly to. And so we’re hoping it’s the start of something big.” 

The Air Force has been playing with the idea of automation for cargo aircraft for several years now.  

Its agile combat employment concept for dispersing forces in the event of a fight with China would make troops and aircraft harder to target—but also create challenges for supplying those forces.  

Autonomous cargo could be the answer, industry officials say. Without a pilot, aircraft could fly more sorties and be sent into more contested airspace. And smaller aircraft like the Cessna 208 could be particularly useful for acting as a cargo “feeder,” O’Brien said, taking relatively small loads from larger cargo aircraft to smaller locations like those envisioned for agile combat employment. 

At multiple Agile Flag exercises last year, Reliable Robotics flew a Cessna in California in demonstrations for the Air Force. A competitor, Xwing—since acquired by Joby Aviation—also flew demos at multiple exercises, setting the stage for its bigger demonstration at REFORPAC. 

O’Brien said Reliable did not fly in REFORPAC in part because of the company’s “FAA certification timeline.” Getting certified by the FAA is key, he said, and once that is in place the Air Force can operate it more freely. 

“There are a couple of reasons why it didn’t make sense in REFORPAC, but we expect we’ll be flying in future Air Force exercises here very soon,” he said. 

Another startup trying to get into the automated cargo game is Grid Aero, which recently unveiled a prototype “flying pickup truck” cargo drone. DZYNE is another: it delivered multiple autonomous cargo gliders to the Air Force that can be launched out the back of a C-17 or C-130. 

The Air Force is also pushing the bounds of autonomy with combat aircraft, such as the Collaborative Combat Aircraft and Autonomous Collaborative Platforms initiative. In order to make sure those efforts can mesh as needed, the service is developing an Autonomy-Government Reference Architecture—essentially an open architecture that different contractors can plug into as needed. 

Last month, USAF signed a cooperative research and development agreement with Reliable to work on that architecture. Reliable’s autonomy system already uses an open architecture, so working together makes sense, as both the Air Force and Reliable are tackling similar challenges. 

“We’re going to work together on standards and references to make sure that the Air Force gets something that is rock solid in terms of being able to apply across multiple vendors,” O’Brien said. “Because they’re going to want to be able to take advantage of the best in breed in everything, I mean, avionics, communications, system software, I mean, you name it. So you’re effectively going to have, potentially, an aircraft that’s got to cooperate with a lot of vendors.”