Lockheed Martin takes drone delivery to the next level for DARPA

Amazon may be seriously pursuing their idea for drone deliveries to their customers, but they're not the only ones interested in this sort of thing. Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works is developing a similar idea for the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), but they're going a little bit bigger with the concept with their ARES program.

DARPA started this idea back in 2009, with their Transformer TX program, which was to create a flying car for use by the U.S. military. Skunk Works played around with the idea, though (as they seem to do with all the projects put in front of them), and came up with the ARES (Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System) instead. This isn't just a flying car, but instead is an unmanned, multi-purpose, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drone system that looks like something out of a video game or a science fiction movie.

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Skunk Works has come up with some pretty amazing innovations over the years, starting with the prototype for the U.S. Air Force's very first jet fighter, and including things like the SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 Night Hawk stealth jets, and an array of other 'cutting edge' military aircraft. The downside of this is that all that innovation is being put towards creating tools of warfare, but unfortunately, given the state of the world today, these kinds of developments are still considered necessary. At least these innovations will ultimately help to protect the lives of soldiers putting their lives on the line in the world's conflicts, and eventually the technology will very likely find its way into civilian applications as well. Perhaps years down the road, we'll be flying our own personal vehicles based on this ARES design, or flying cargo by robot drone could become a new standard for the shipping industry.

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