Robytes
by Jeff Eckert
The Vulture Seldom Comes
Home to Roost
On a more celestial level, DARPA
is also funding a competition to
develop an unmanned aerial vehicle
that will shatter endurance records.
The bird will draw 5 k W of power,
carry a 1,000 lb (450 kg) payload,
stay aloft for at least five years, and
remain in its assigned airspace 99
percent of the time while fighting
winds encountered at operating
altitudes, reportedly ranging from
60,000 to 90,000 ft ( 18,000 to
27,000 m). The goal is to provide
long-term intelligence, surveillance,
reconnaissance, and communication
missions over locations of interest.
Contractors for phase one are
Aurora Flight Sciences ( www.aurora.
aero), Boeing ( www.boeing.com),
and Lockheed Martin (www.lock
heedmartin.com). A variety of
propulsion approaches — including
solar and internal combustion — will
be considered; however, nuclear and
lighter-than-air designs have been
ruled out. The winning design must
comply with space — not aviation —
industry standards, because only a
“pseudo-satellite” will handle the
demanding requirements. A supervisory engineer at NASA observed,
“What you don’t want to build is a
fragile, expensive pain in the butt.”
The Aurora offering will be based
on its “Odysseus”
design, which uses solar
power during daylight
hours and stored energy
at night. It combines
three “constituent
aircraft” in a 500 ft
(150 m), intriguing
Z-wing configuration.
Boeing is expected to
field a design based on
the existing British-built
Zephyr high-altitude,
long-endurance UAV,
from partner QinetiQ
( www.qinetiq.com).
Lockheed Martin is still
mum on the subject.
The competitors have 12 months
to come up with their initial designs
for DARPA review. Phase two will end
with a three-month flight test of a
subscale demonstrator, and the final
phase will require a 12-month test of
a full-scale vehicle.
Aurora’s Odysseus design: A possible
configuration of the Vulture UAV.
Photo courtesy of Aurora Flight Sciences.
million over three years from the
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency ( www.darpa.gov) — is
iRobot ( www.irobot.com). Under
the grant, the company will develop
the LANdroid robot, a portable communications relay device. According
to the contractor, “This robot will be
small enough that a single dismounted
warfighter can carry multiple robots,
inexpensive to the point of being
disposable, robust enough to allow
the warfighter to drop and throw
them into position, and smart enough
to autonomously detect and avoid
obstacles while navigating in the
urban environment.”
The objective is to enable
networking in urban areas where
buildings and other pesky objects
can block wireless operations. In
operation, each of the little guys will
wander around until it finds a good
spot to function as a node and then
join the rest of the swarm to form
the network. If one is destroyed, the
others will adjust their positions to
keep the system up and running.
Mini Network Bots
New Touch Technology
Also pulling down government
funding — in this case, up to $3
One of the perennial problems in
robotics is improving the machine’s
Sneak peak at what the LANdroid robot will look like. Photo courtesy of DARPA.
8 SERVO 07.2008