The groups origins lay in 1942 when the British formed groups that could reinforce the Escort Group accompanying a trans-atlantic convoy. The Allied Atlantic Convoy Conference of early 1943 agreed to set up ten groups of anti-submarine warships with an escort carrier in each. Five Anglo-Canadian groups would operate in the North Atlantic ocean and five US groups in the Middle Atlantic.[1] The advances in signals intelligence such as 'Huff-Duff' (HF/DF), in crypotological intelligence such as Ultra, and in detection technologies such as radar and sonar/ASDIC enabled the Allied navies to form flotillas designed actively to hunt down submarines and sink them. A hunter-killer group would typically be formed around an escort carrier to provide aerial reconnaissance and air cover, with a number of corvettes, destroyers, destroyer escorts, frigates, and/or United States Coast Guard Cutters armed with depth charges and Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar.First seen in The Terminator these unmanned vehicles (Aerial Hunter-Killer and Tank Hunter-Killer) are a family of combat robotics used by Skynet to wipe out survivors of a nuclear holocaust. In the Terminator franchise, they have branched into multiple designs of varying sizes and purposes. What all Aerial HK share is that their jet engines are mounted on rotating pylons on the end of the center-mounted wing, allowing vertical takeoff and landing, hovering, and rotation in place while having the speed of a jet aircraft. The basic (as depicted in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day) HK has a pair of engines (with a smaller third engine mounted on the tail in Terminator 3), a large plasma cannon mounted under the nose (variants in Terminator Salvation had twin cannons), and is used for air-to-ground combat (although a capable fighter too). Other variations include smaller models that can navigate inside buildings, large four-engine transport or heavy bomber models, early models armed with conventional guns, and the revised models seen in Terminator 3 and Terminator: Salvation. A nearly identical craft appears in the unrelated TV series Starhunter (2000–2001) as a type of human-piloted gunship Non-Humanoid Hunter Killers are robots that don't have the shape of a human body or skeleton of any kind. These machines were developed for combat.
Several machines where developed and created by Cyberdyne Systems, Cyber Research Systems, or Skynet.