DARPA Seeks Speedy, Tiny, Agile UAVs to Navigate Inside Buildings
The U.S. military can get a bird’s-eye view of a battlefield or humanitarian mission via use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Now, it wants to get into buildings without having troops actually step foot inside.
The Pentagon’s main research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), circulated a Broad Agency Announcement for its Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program, focused on acquiring algorithms that would let small, autonomous assets access buildings and navigate the “labyrinth of rooms, stairways and corridors or other obstacle-filled environments,” according to the agency.
Some of the parameters include having the aerial vehicles small enough to fit through an open window and able to fly at speeds of roughly 45 miles per hour.
“Birds of prey and flying insects exhibit the kinds of capabilities we want for small UAVs,” Mark Micire, DARPA program manager, says in a press release. “Goshawks, for example, can fly very fast through a dense forest without smacking into a tree. Many insects, too, can dart and hover with incredible speed and precision. The goal of the FLA program is to explore nontraditional perception and autonomy methods that would give small UAVs the capacity to perform in a similar way, including an ability to easily navigate tight spaces at high speed and quickly recognize if it had already been in a room before.”
The effort to develop smaller platforms isn’t exactly new. The Defense Department already has fielded small robotic systems, but in small quantities to fulfill rapid acquisition requests. The Army is developing pocket-sized aerial surveillance devices through the Cargo Pocket Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Program, for example.
And several years ago, the Army Research Laboratory began research on developing life-size robotic sensor platforms made to look like insects.
DARPA’s request doesn’t necessarily seek new designs or platform concepts. Instead, it seeks to harness technology that would help existing platforms fly indoors in a cluttered environment and produce technological enhancements for unmanned system capabilities by reducing the requirements such as processing power, communications and the need for humans to control the UAVs. Solutions would enable missions otherwise not possible, such as allowing reconnaissance missions in caves or collapsed or damaged buildings.
“Urban and disaster relief operation would be obvious key beneficiaries, but applications for this technology could extend to a wide variety of missions using small and large unmanned systems linked together with manned platforms as a system of systems,” Stefanie Tompkins, director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, says in the release. “By enabling unmanned systems to learn ‘muscle memory’ and perception for basic tasks like avoiding obstacles, it would relieve overload and stress on human operators so they can focus on supervising the systems and executing the larger mission."
Responses to the solicitation are due by February 5.
