The assembled commercial components are finished off with a 3D-printed outer mold line from MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Those sourcing decisions give the project an edge, Roper said. Rather than spending money to obtain an “end-zone” technology now that may be outdated in a year or two, the Air Force can incorporate continual innovations from the commercial sector.

“Could the DOD go build an improvement on each of those components?” Roper said. “Absolutely. But it’s smart to stay inside the commercial base, because it’s going to improve itself. A lot of the pieces come from microelectronics that have been driven by the smartphone industry, and that continues to improve.”

The model fits within SCO’s overall ethos and also means that they’ve been able to rapidly upgrade prototypes after every operational test at minimal cost, Roper said. They’ve flown the UAV more than 500 times—about 300 of them from aircraft—and are now on Perdix’s seventh generation.

At an operational exercise called Northern Edge in Alaska, “we had F-16s and F-18s carry and deploy swarms of Perdixes that flew,” Roper said. “Then we took the feedback from that—that was three design spirals ago—and we have updated the design for improved performance. And not just that, but [we could] take the feedback from the run at the mission and then do changes to the design to the software and then re-fly it the next day.”

In tests, the Air Force and SCO will look to burn down some of the program’s risk, establishing loiter time, reliability ratings, speed, and other specifics. Roper said they’ll decide at the end of the next fiscal year if the program is ready to move to the Air Force.

“We have to get a lot of airdrops of these aircraft to be able to tell the Air Force they have a reliability rating of pick-a-number,” he said. “If the rating isn’t high and the Air Force needs these for a critical mission, they have to go find a target quickly, it’s not a good match.”

That surveillance mission would be carried out by a swarm deployed from a fast-moving fighter, with each dormant Perdix shielded from the winds of traveling at several hundred meter per second winds by a carbon fiber canister that eventually separates from the drone.

“Once it wakes up, stabilizing in flight, it’s trying do the cross-links to all its brothers and sisters, and then it knows its mission,” Roper said. “And when I say ‘it,’ I’m really talking about the swarm. As a unit, they know what they’re supposed to do. So say we’re telling these guys to go out and survey a field. As a group they have that mission, and what they’ll do is allocate and optimize the best way to do it. All the user has to talk to is the swarm.”

Here’s a video of a Perdix deployment, first obtained by the Washington Post.