3D Robotics
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Cross-posted from the 3DR blog.

This past March, Mark Jacobsen (pictured above holding an Ed Ansley Peace Drone prototype), a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford, spent a week in Turkey conducting field research among Syrian refugees and activists. At that time the sieges by the Syrian government were at their worst, and the refugees Mark spoke with told him tragic stories, venting their frustration with the U.S. for not airdropping food and other supplies to the besieged areas. Mark, an active-duty C-17 pilot in the U.S. Air Force, explained why the U.S. can’t do airdrops in Syria: Manned cargo planes are vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire, so you can’t conduct airdrops without also launching a major combat operation to take down those air defense systems.

Normally the discussion would end there. That night, though, moved and troubled by the stories he’d heard and the people he’d met, Mark couldn’t sleep. The more thought he gave the issue, the more absurd it seemed that in the 21st century we still don’t have a way to deliver critical humanitarian aid through contested airspace so it gets to those who need it most. Mark wouldn’t let the problem go, and a few months later he launched the Syria Airlift Project.

The project

The Syria Airlift Project (SAP) seeks to end the use of mass starvation and medical deprivation as weapons of warfare. The group and its partners are exploring creative ways to deliver humanitarian aid in conflict zones that are inaccessible to traditional aid organizations. They’ve focused their initial efforts on Syria, where according to a 2014 report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, an estimated 240,000 people have been besieged and deprived of both food and medicine, and seven million more are considered difficult to access because of violent and chaotic conditions on the ground.

Mark, however, believes that fleets of small, inexpensive and easy-to-use drones can cheaply and safely deliver critical humanitarian aid—via a large amount of small packets—where larger aircraft cannot. “Imagine an army of ants stealing a picnic lunch, bite by bite,” Mark says. Or perhaps more constructively, an army of people contributing to a massive encyclopedia, byte by byte.

The project aims to use swarming principles and simple airdrop mechanisms to unload bundles of food or medicine outfitted with parachutes at pre-programmed GPS coordinates. The drones are small and quiet and will fly at night so that hostile actors won’t be able to track them; if they do, the drones wouldn’t even be worth shooting down one at a time. Because there are hundreds of them and they’re so small and cheap, no one aircraft is all that important, and it’s Mark’s bet that almost all will complete their mission.

The technology

The whole premise of the Syria Airlift Project is that effective drones can be built cheaply and in large numbers. Made of a simple airframe built from Dollar Tree foam board, packing tape, and hot glue, each aircraft (all-in, with servos, motors, props, autopilot and batteries) costs less than $500. Mark chose to use 3D Robotics APM 2.6 autopilots because they’re inexpensive and widely available, and also because the open-source software can be customized for specific purposes. The SAP’s autopilot modifications include a self-destruct mechanism to prevent the technology from falling into the hands of hostile actors, as well as special navigation instructions in the event of GPS loss or jamming.

The SAP also needed a low-cost way to coordinate simultaneous flights of dozens or even hundreds of these drones, so they created Swarmify, a custom mission planning tool. Mark says that if you give Swarmify one original flight plan, the software can create any number of slightly different flight plans that are randomized by altitude, route and timing. This allows them to quickly create and upload nearly identical and simultaneous flight plans for a whole swarm of drones, while also ensuring safe and collision-free flight.

When a mission comes up, a core team of experts will initiate mission planning and deploy select mobile field crews in Turkey to launch and recover the drones. In flight, the drones will maintain relatively low altitudes as they cross the border into Syria, where they’ll drop their cargo by parachute at the designated coordinates before returning to Turkey. These missions will be coordinated with both the Turkish government and with an extensive network of both Syrians and international aid organizations.

The people

The simplicity of the aircraft offers other advantages, too. Because the drones are built from common materials like foam board and hot glue, refugees need no special skills to take part in assembly, and once trained by visiting instructors, a four-man team can build ten a day. To that end, the Syria Airlift Project also partners with People Demand Change (PDC), a U.S. nonprofit based in Turkey that seeks to empower local populations, who will oversee the employment of Syrian refugees in assembling these airframes.

In this way, Mark hopes his project will also empower Syrian refugee communities, providing meaningful work to those who otherwise have limited means to contribute to their own cause. Aircraft construction will take place in schools and refugee camps in Turkey, where children will have the opportunity to decorate the airframes. The drones will then deliver parcels of food and medicine labeled not only with national and corporate sponsors, but also with symbols and language communicating a shared positive vision of Syria’s future.

The path

Obviously, the challenges the project faces aren’t exactly minimal, among them assessing and minimizing risk of of military retaliation or escalation, preventing unwanted technology transfer, and complying with U.S. and Turkish law to secure a sound legal basis for entering Syria. But the project is still in an early phase. Until now their work has primarily been exploratory, but this weekend Mark will publicly unveil the Syria Airlift Project at a pitch contest hosted by the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF), a private organization that exists to encourage innovative thinking in the Department of Defense. In the coming months the SAP plans to incorporate as a nonprofit organization, publicize their efforts and begin fundraising.

You could conservatively call Mark’s vision ambitious. At one point he tried to build a drone made entirely of granola, flying food that could be eaten upon crashing. He convinced his wife to cook up a prototype, but they never got the Granola Wing off the ground. (Visit the original 3DR blog post to see a pic.)

“What we’re proposing is insane, I know,” says Mark. “It likely can’t be done. But I keep reminding myself that perhaps it can, and if so, it might save thousands of lives and have a real impact on the Syrian civil war, creating a positive foundation for cooperation on which a shattered society can begin to build.”

We here at 3DR are proud to sponsor Mark and the Syria Airlift Project. If you’d like to help, too, you can contact them at info@syriaairlift.org.

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Comments

  • Seems like this will help the terrorists and dictators!

    It doesn't seem like a good, or moral, idea to me.

    Worst case, the bad guys get free supplies.

    Best case, you're reducing the impetus for revolution, thus condemning the Syrians to further generations of oppression.

    People will fight before they starve to death, every time.  But you can keep people on the edge of starvation for generations without revolt.

  • I'm new here.  I like the idea. 

    A couple of thoughts on scale.  I understand it is not linear.  Need for power, I believe, goes up as the cube of scale.  What happens to payload and range.  Seems to me there may be a little bit of ...experimental error/fudging but the basic functions should be math derived from the science of it. 

    Also it seems to me that I saw a comparison of LiOn battery to Gasoline for power density.  Gas won by a WIDE margin.  Why restrict the design to a battery plane?  Converting a weed whacker can't be all that tough and Honda has a neat little 50cc 4 stroke.  Don't want it to be loud on the ground?  Fly a little higher!

    As far as food, the freeze dried stuff is really quite light.  As long as they have water all is well, given that it is a desert, natch.

    Comments?

  • Good idea , but need more develop ...

  • This one looks dead easy to make and large enough for some payload (with a second motor):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdjJWZSJzhw

    I think collisions can be easily avoided by launching the individual aircrafts with, say, a minute delay, one after the other and have them return on a different route. And if the self-destruct puts the full battery voltage to the APM, there should be not much left to reflash.

    About feasibility:

    If one has 10 aircrafts that can carry 5lbs of payload and do 5 missions per night, that is 250lbs of goods every night. If no water has to be transported, with dehydrated food that might be enough to keep 500 people from starving (just guessing). Quite good for a start!

  • @turdsufer: You would indeed gain some ability with a setup like that, but our philosophy is to keep things as cheap and simple as possible. Getting the vehicles to talk to each other makes things exponentially more complicated, and you now have a series of datalinks that can be exploited. For our purposes, I think deconfliction will be sufficient, but we will work to validate that assumption.

  • I like the Swarmify concept for things like that. I've been pondering on a similar idea myself. 

    With the Swarmify you described, each vehicle get's it's own mission plan and basically fly without knowing about the presence of other swarm vehicles.

    What I think would be better though, is that 1 vehicle has a mission plan (or is simply flown manually), and the other swarm members follow the leader and have a preset relative position in the swarm formation. If the leader goes down, then either they all return to home on different altitudes, or even better, another swarm member takes over the lead based on some preset order.

    If I were on pension or a jobless rich guy, I'd gladly spend my time trying to develop something like that, but right now, I'm completely bogged down in work from my day job.

  • @Mark

    As I said, we are going to focus in the beginning on medical supplies and low-mass, high-value goods like vitamins, water purifiers, and baby milk.

    I highly doubt poor villagers out in the middle of Syria even know or have seen a bottle of vitamins.

    How exactly do you know where to drop what ? Are you just going to fly about dropping supplies in random places ?

    The symbolic value also cannot be quantified

    Have you just admitted this is a folly and has no practical value ? Is this is a stupid stunt of some sort ?

    That is why we are building custom failsafes like APM self-destruct mechanisms that trigger if the planes go down in Syria. 

    They are evil, but they are not stupid. What happens when they just reflash the APM and collect other parts from your lost plane ?

  • Mark Jacobsen
    No need mechanically destruct.
    90% of cost in such project will contain electronics and electrical system.
    Just send non-apopriate voltage or sygnal combination via program and set "fuses" in controller in nonworkable position from outer security sheme for destroing u drone.
    If AP board is maked solid and non-able-dismout component this "bricked" drone avionics systems at all.

  • Bill Piedra

    Why not? There are different types...
    Historically deltaplane was developed in NASA as army delivery system
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_XV-8
    =)

  • Hey guys, I don't have much time to reply now but wanted to say thanks for the flow of ideas. I am taking every idea down. I make no claim to technical expertise; in fact, when I first started this project, I'd never flown an RC plane before. So I welcome ideas from minds bigger than my own (and if anyone wants to commit to helping with the project, we could use the help!)

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