Holy crap. DARPA has just announced a project to use the DIY Drones model for the future of military UAVs. Called UAVForge, which is already up and running (although it crashes Firefox on my machine), it is described in the official request for proposals like this:
This initiative aims to produce a small, affordable, and easy to operate unmanned air vehicle capable of persistent perch and stare surveillance. The successful offeror will empower a diverse community of innovators and emergent design teams by providing manufacturing capabilities and assessments and producing up to 15 units of the winning design. The UAVForge initiative will employ a collaboration website and a fly-off competition, both developed and administered for DARPA/TTO by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, Atlantic (SSC Atlantic), Charleston, SC.
Here's a conceptual video:
Many more details are in the full pdf description here. It's a $2 million project, with $100,000 going to the winning designer.
Some excerpts:
Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have proven important in modern military operations and
show promise for civil applications. Portable UAVs are used by the military for reconnaissance
missions and have been used commercially for tasks such as monitoring oil and gas pipelines,
and tracking wildfires. However, the effective use of state-of-the-art systems is constrained by
cost and performance as well as high logistic support and operator skill and workload demands,
compared to more routinely employed portable military equipment, like GPS and night vision
devices.
The UAVForge initiative will use a collaboration/competition crowdsource approach to produce
a small, affordable, and easy to operate UAV capable of persistent perch and stare surveillance.
Novel manufacturing concepts and resources will empower a diverse community of innovators
and emergent teams to deliver a superior UAV system solution relative to state-of-the-art
systems. The overall objective of UAVForge is to develop an aircraft that costs $10,000 or less
per unit, can be carried in a rucksack by an individual, can fly to and perch in useful locations at
several kilometers range for periods of several hours, and provide continuous, real-time
surveillance without dedicated or specialized operators.
In this solicitation, DARPA is seeking innovative manufacturing services to facilitate the
UAVForge initiative. The selected manufacturer will support collaboration and produce the
winning design from the UAVForge competition.
UAVForge is a DARPA/TTO initiative supported by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems
Center, Atlantic (SSC Atlantic), Charleston, South Carolina, to leverage the unique potential of
crowdsourcing. SSC Atlantic will develop and maintain the www.UAVForge.net website, which
provides participants with the virtual environment and tools necessary to organize and
collaborate independent of geographic location, education, profession, or experience. The virtual
environment features collaboration tools including shared and private information spaces,
message boards, mailing lists, and other features that enable effective collaboration.
Collaboration will focus on an objective list of small UAV capabilities (Appendix 1). A series of
multimedia-based milestones (Appendix 2) will encourage the formation of ad-hoc teams around
promising solutions. These teams will develop functional design prototypes. DARPA will select,
based on published criteria and crowd/manufacturer input, the top ten designs to participate in a
fly-off competition hosted by SSC Atlantic (Appendix 3). DARPA will select one winning
design based on the results of the competition and crowd/manufacturer input. The winning team
will receive a $100,000 prize and an invitation to participate in an exclusive overseas military
demonstration exercise.
The selected manufacturer from this solicitation will provide the winning team with a subcontract to produce an initial lot of up to 15 UAVs for government experimentation. The selected manufacturer will play an integral role in the evolution and execution of the UAVForge initiative. For planning purposes, award of the manufacturing services contract will occur four months after the start of UAVForge collaboration and four months before the fly-off competition.
Comments
I guess you can argue that all things can be used as a weapon - the motive of the user decides the outcome. So what i would like to see is a situation were there is more incentive/motive to develop a UAV for a civilian application than for military.
Could we propose a counter competition? A motive to do something good, not create cheap weapons for the military? I recon we could raise the $100k prize money too...There are what, 10,000 members on DIYdrones? Thats $10 each....
How about a drone that hunts for drones that are perched watching things....
"Quadrocopter drone with miniguns, kinect cams, infrared laser beam, speaker phone, delayed explosive devices, and can kamikaze if terrorist tries to take advantage of it. So you can get up close and personal with these buzzers and have a translater speaking to them. They are making that new spray too, to identify targets and track them as well, heres how. Not to mention pepper spray, tasers, and flash grenades oh my. Imagine every Marine unit having one of these bad boys when they are in the bush or out and above in a convoy. They get hit, they got dis maw fucka on their ass NOW! This shit right here, can maneuver through trees too with the protective holy protectors of the blades. The guns may be too heavy and a single barrel and one weapon would do the trick. It could be a low caliber gun too. Just use these babies to go see whats going on across the valley. This thing would be the ultimate fucking side kick in the combat zone. controlled via remote control hooked up to a tablet, like ice cream sandwich is bringin."
1) Must take-off and land vertically (so it's a heli/quad requirement)
2) Must be able to fly for 3 hours (I'm hearing 10 minutes is a good flight time on a quad...that's 18 times longer)
3) Must work at distances of 2 miles with a max altitude of 1000 ft. (Will X-Bee's go through 2 miles of trees and houses?)
4) Has to be able to be carried in a "rucksack" by one operator (this rules out 6 car batteries to power the quad)
Think of it as a wish list, 1)check 3)check 4)check
2) well, maybe next year.
I have an idea for BWB airframe that may be able to do this with special 3 motor propulsion system at 3 kilos and duration of 2 hrs maybe perching counts as mission time?
It could charge with solar cells in covering material....
then continue mission with a little more juice. It may be able to thermal as well
and harvest ac power through motor windings when perched near or on ac lines!
I may build a manned (optional) sized version for real work.... could be fun...
I just read through the UAVforge "rules" and have realized this is an absurd competition with the hobby grade electronics we have available.
1) Must take-off and land vertically (so it's a heli/quad requirement)
2) Must be able to fly for 3 hours (I'm hearing 10 minutes is a good flight time on a quad...that's 18 times longer)
3) Must work at distances of 2 miles with a max altitude of 1000 ft. (Will X-Bee's go through 2 miles of trees and houses?)
4) Has to be able to be carried in a "rucksack" by one operator (this rules out 6 car batteries to power the quad)
Someone had stated the vehicle must be able to "perch" which doesn't seem to be the case. It says it can land, adhere, hover or hang....but hanging on a electrical wire may be a requirement to get the 3 hours of flight time.
We are using past Darpa projects to discuss this new one, a computer network, graphical user interface, and hypertext. And I would not be surprised if the Darpa Grand Challenge influenced the technology and events that lead to the creation of DIYdrones. And now they are incubating our community with cash and prizes. Look at the darpa current projects list on wikipedia, I am sure this is how Skynet gets started. : p
Sorry and forget what I wrote.
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