It was another busy week for deals in the Northwest, with lots of action in cloud computing software, mobile, and healthcare. Xconomy even got into the act, inking a partnership with The Seattle Times (see below).

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) acquired Lexcycle, an e-book startup based in Portland, OR, and Austin, TX. No financial terms were given. Lexcycle makes an online bookstore application called Stanza for desktops and the iPhone. The move is viewed as part of Amazon’s effort to consolidate its position in the e-book reader market for mobile devices.

—Seattle-based Symform, a cloud data storage startup, raised $1.5 million in Series A financing from OVP Venture Partners in Kirkland, WA. Symform, founded in late 2007, has developed an online data backup service for small to medium-sized businesses that is fast and relatively cheap. It is in public beta trials and plans to release its full service later this year. OVP’s Mark Ashida talked about the deal and some broader issues in investment strategy.

—Opscode, a stealthy Seattle startup working on cloud computing infrastructure for businesses, closed $2.5 million in Series A funding, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Founded last year, Opscode says it will use the new cash to hire engineers and other key staff as it gets ready to launch its core cloud service this year.

—Seattle-based PATH, a global health nonprofit, received two grants worth $52 million to combat the spread of HIV, as Luke reported. The three-year grants are from the U.S. Agency for International Development ($35 million) to strengthen communities’ response to HIV in Ethiopia, and from the Canadian International Development Agency ($17 million) to aid HIV prevention efforts.

—Seattle-based LookStat, a maker of Web-based analytics and workflow automation software for the microstock photography industry, raised $500,000 from Seattle’s Founder’s Co-op and individual investors. LookStat is in public beta trials and looking to sell its service to photographers who want to know what kinds of photos are selling where, for example. Co-founder Rahul Pathak talked about what his company is doing, and provided some more context around the deal.

—Ryan reported on the Northwest’s second-biggest financing deal of 2009 so far, Seattle-based NewPath Networks’ $30 million funding led by Charterhouse Group in New York, with Denver-based Meritage Funds also participating. NewPath, founded in 2004, designs and operates wireless technologies such as antenna networks and underground fiber-optic cables for carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, who need to provide wireless coverage in remote and difficult-to-access places.

—Bingen, WA-based Insitu, a developer of drone aircraft, received a one-year, $30 million contract from the Canadian government to ship small, unmanned aerial vehicles in support of Canadian military operations in Afghanistan. Insitu was acquired by Boeing (NYSE: BA) for about $400 million last summer.

—Hillsboro, OR-based Kryptiq, a maker of collaborative software for healthcare providers, sold off its health plan network management software line, called Choreo, to Portico Systems in Blue Bell, PA. Financial terms were not announced. Kryptiq’s core product helps providers share information with patients, labs, and pharmacies.

—Luke broke the news that Redmond, WA-based Asemblon has raised $2.9 million in the first installment of a Series C financing, led by London-based RAB Capital and Japan’s Sojitz Trading. Asemblon is working on a novel technology for storing hydrogen fuel using organic carrier molecules that can release hydrogen on demand, enabling the fuel to be stored at room temperature and without high pressure.

—Lastly, Xconomy has formed a partnership with The Seattle Times, whereby the Business/Technology section of Seattletimes.com gets an automatic feed of news and features headlines from Xconomy Seattle, as Luke announced. This syndication deal comes on the heels of another partnership we formed with the Seattle P-I back in December to share online stories.

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Bingen, WA-based Insitu, a developer of unmanned aircraft systems, announced today it has received a one-year, $30 million contract from the Canadian government to provide technologies to support Canadian forces’ operations in Afghanistan. The contract, which includes two additional one-year options, specifically calls for small unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Insitu was acquired by Boeing (NYSE: BA) for about $400 million last summer.

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San Diego’s General Atomics Aeronautical Systems said it has begun flight testing a jet-powered version of its Predator unmanned aircraft system (UAS) with a stealthier design and with the ability to operate aboard Navy aircraft carriers.

Dubbed the “Avenger,” the jet-powered version of the armed surveillance aircraft can fly as high as 60,000 feet and at speeds of roughly 460 mph (400 knots true air speed), which is almost twice as fast as the turboprop-powered Predator B, which has a top speed of 276 (240 KTAS). The Avenger’s first flight was April 4 at the company’s flight operations facility in Palmdale, CA, north of Los Angeles.

A recent preview on the Ares defense blog describes the Avenger as a “UCAV,” an unmanned combat aerial vehicle, designed with a sleek profile, folding wings, and a tailhook for landings aboard aircraft carriers. That could pose some furrowed eyebrows at Northrop Grumman, which has been developing the competing X-47B Pegasus in San Diego for Navy carrier operations under a Pentagon contract.

Developing unmanned aircraft with its own funding, rather than operating under a government contract, has been a hallmark of GA-Aeronautical Systems under retired Adm. Tom Cassidy. In a statement, Cassidy says, “Our company has been uniquely successful in forecasting military needs and delivering extremely capable aircraft that are ready for near-term military use.”

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I was a little surprised yesterday when Enerdyne Technologies, a subsidiary of Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat, said encryption technology is now available for its digital data link systems to unmanned military surveillance aircraft.

Isn’t the video transmitted from robotic spy planes already encrypted?

Not necessarily, says Enerdyne general manager Steve Gardner. As it turns out, it’s possible to buy a standard commercial FM receiver used by TV news organizations and tune it to “eavesdrop” on the analog video signal transmitted by several different types of robotic aircraft used by the U.S. military. He says in the early years of UAV development, aircraft companies encrypted the digital electronics used to control UAVs, but “typically chose small analog transmitters” to broadcast video signals from the aircraft to ground units. That could be a problem if the eavesdroppers are U.S. adversaries in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Gardner says whether that scenario should be a concern has become a hot topic of discussion these days in defense circles that are focused on the development and use of UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles.

Gardner says Enerdyne now has developed a module that can be installed aboard a UAV, between its camera and analog video transmitter. The module, which is a little bigger than a handheld calculator, digitizes and compresses the video signal so it can be encrypted without necessitating changes in the analog video transmitter aboard the plane or in U.S. equipment receiving the video signal on the ground. Enerdyne uses another module on the ground to decrypt the video signal.

“From the perspective of the FM equipment that they have on the airplane and on the ground, they can’t tell the difference,” Gardner says. The innovation reflects …Next Page »

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Massachusetts’ growing robotics cluster just got bigger. For the second time in less than six months, an iRobot co-founder has launched a robotics startup. Helen Greiner told me in an e-mail yesterday that she has formed a stealth company called The Droid Works. “Our first project is in the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] space, and a team of people from around the country are working on this project today,” her short note said.

Beyond that, the note contained little, and Greiner (our newest Xconomist) didn’t say much more when I reached her on her cell phone, declining to discuss how the company was funded, the number of people involved, or anything else of substance. “I am not ready to describe the types of UAVs, missions, or what the company will take on in the future yet,” her note said. The one thing she clarified on the phone was that she didn’t mean to imply—as I had wondered about from her note—that The Droid Works is a virtual company. Rather, all she meant by saying people are working from around the country, she says, is that not everyone working on the first project is based in the Boston area.

A shell website can be found here. If I had to guess from its name, The Droid Works might be set up to tackle different types of projects in robotics, rather than being focused solely on UAVs. I also think the website looks like it has the same designer as fellow iRobot co-founder Rod Brooks’s Heartland Robotics, so I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection between Brooks’s firm and Greiner’s, or if they might be sharing space in Cambridge’s Central Square, where Heartland is based.

Greiner’s venture comes a little more than five months after Brooks (who’s also an Xconomist) left iRobot, where he was CTO, to found Heartland, which is focused on creating workplace robots.

Greiner herself stepped down as chairman of iRobot’s board and as a full-time employee about seven weeks later, in late October. Like Brooks, she remains on the iRobot board.

When I reached her the day her iRobot departure was announced, Greiner related how she had gotten hooked on robotics when she was 11, and that she had no intention of leaving the field. However, she said she was going to take some time to reflect and continue her public service work—she serves on the boards of MIT and the Boston Museum of Science, and as chair of the national Robotic Technology Consortium, among other roles—before making any decisions about her career. “I’m going to keep doing all of those things while I take a look around at what I want to do next,” she told me.

I even asked her at the time if she was joining Brooks at Heartland or had her eye on some other company. “I honestly don’t have any entity that I’m thinking about right now. I really want to be able to take a look around, and I would never feel comfortable doing that as chairman of iRobot,” Greiner said.

Now it appears she has found her comfort zone.

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It has taken roughly 10 years, but a robotic helicopter created in San Diego by Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) is finally nearing a critical test phase for the U.S. Navy.

The unmanned aircraft, known as the Fire Scout, looks unremarkable, except for the fact that it has no windows. It is based on a small civilian helicopter, the Schweizer Model 333, and New York-based Schweizer Aircraft supplies the basic airframe.

But the electronics inside the gray helicopter are another story. Known in the military bureaucracy as a VUAS, or Vertical Unmanned Aircraft System, the Fire Scout is intended primarily for maritime reconnaissance and for “situational awareness” just beyond the edges of a Naval battle group. It also has a laser to pinpoint targets for the Navy’s laser-guided missiles and bombs. The robotic helicopter is designed to take off and land autonomously, fly as far as 110 nautical miles (about 126.6 statute miles), and operate continuously for 8 hours.

The Fire Scout and USS McInerney

When I noticed the Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, MD, recently awarded a $40 million follow-on order to make three more Fire Scouts, I decided to ask Northrop for an update on the aircraft’s progress.

After completing a crucial series of tests in 2006, the Fire Scout is scheduled to undergo a technical evaluation aboard the guided missile frigate U.S.S. McInerney in the next few months. “The Navy wants to see how wind affects the aircraft and how it performs with the ship at sea,” says John VanBrabant, who heads business development for the V-UAS (Vertical Unmanned Aircraft System) group at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in San Diego.

To appreciate what this means, VanBrabant says the tests conducted in January, 2006, showed the helicopter’s electronics can land the Fire Scout autonomously on a moving Navy warship that was operating off the coast of Maryland. The robotic …Next Page »

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Here at Xconomy we usually focus on technologies already hitting the marketplace rather than laboratory-stage investigations. But last week we got wind of a project that’s so cool we just had to write about it: an effort to build tiny robot planes with flexible structures and built-in reflexes that would allow them to ricochet off walls or objects unharmed and recover their flight paths, the same way house flies bounce off windows.

They’re called “biomimetic micro air vehicles” or MAVs, and they’re the subject of a study at Harvard University and Andover, MA-based Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) that just won funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. PSI does contract R&D work on aerospace, energy, environmental, manufacturing, and medical technologies, and the eventual goal of the MAV project would be to create new kinds of indoor reconnaissance or surveillance craft, carrying tiny cameras, chemical sensors, and the like.

I got the lowdown on the project last week from Tom Vaneck, Physical Sciences’ vice president of space technologies and manager of disruptive technologies—of which the fly-like MAVs would certainly be one. Last time I talked with Vaneck, he was the head of Aurora Flight Sciences‘ Cambridge, MA-based R&D lab; he says he left the aerospace contractor for PSI earlier this year because “I am from a technology sense a little bit ADD,” and that at PSI, “I’m able to have my fingers in many different technology pies.”

Vaneck says there are two fundamental things to think about when a flying object hits a non-moving object. “One, how do you design a structure that can withstand the impact—because if the structure breaks or you are no longer able to generate lift or thrust, you’re done. Two, how do you recover without having to do a lot of environmental sensing or sophisticated computation—you need a method that’s almost instinctual, that automatically reorients the vehicle so that it can fly again.”

Well, those are both problems that evolution—”which has had a long, long time and an infinite budget,” in Vaneck’s words—has already solved. “When a fly hits a window it doesn’t fall down; it goes on to do it a hundred more times,” Vaneck notes.

So PSI is putting the $100,000, Phase 1 Air Force grant into a joint study with Robert Wood, a builder of biologically inspired robots at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory; he’s the creator of the world’s first artificial insect wing with enough lift to get itself off the ground. Together, researchers from PSI and Wood’s lab will study how houseflies and dragonflies recover from collisions, and think about materials such as carbon-fiber composites and a control system that could be used to duplicate the behavior.

The control system may be the harder problem to solve, since it will actually require the engineers to abandon most of the traditional principles of controlled flight. “If you think about a fly, its wing-beating motion if almost a resonant condition,” says Vaneck. “The fly is not continually thinking about moving its wings up and down. Its nervous system just creates a stimulus such that the wings flap, and through their design they generate lift. Now, after a collision, maybe one wing is generating more lift than the other; the control simply needs to go from one resonant condition to another. We think we can manage that without a computer. You just need a mechanism with several ’set points’ that it can switch between.”

Vaneck hopes the 9-month, Phase 1 grant will give the researchers enough time to build a simple prototype and “understand enough of how nature does this to map this over to a man-made system.” Then PSI will apply for a larger, longer Phase 2 grant that would lead to the construction of a working, remote-controlled MAV. “If we can make this work, it will fundamentally change the way people operate small unmanned aircraft,” he says.

I couldn’t resist asking Vaneck whether he ever worries that his work might result in the kinds of creepy insectoid probes often shown in movies like The Matrix or Minority Report. “You can’t help but think about that,” he answers. “Any technology can be morphed into something that is unintended. And there is this visceral reaction—if a movie gadget has to be evil and nasty, it is probably going to look like an insect. But the flip side of that is that insects are very robust systems.”

Vaneck also points out that a robot plane that looked and behaved like an insect might have the advantage of stealth. “If it’s truly bouncing around like an insect,” he says, “maybe it gets overlooked, because it kind of looks like something from the natural world.”

Of course, there’s a flip side to that as well: One good swing of the flyswatter could destroy a very expensive gadget.

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Here’s an idea worthy of Tom Swift: Send a big, long-range unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) such as Northrup Grumman’s Global Hawk into a battle area with a flock of smaller, bird-sized robot planes in its belly. Jettison the baby planes for short-range, low-altitude, low-speed reconnaissance missions, then lower a cable to recapture them, one by one, before bringing the whole flock home.

That’s the scenario envisioned by engineers at MIT and Aurora Flight Sciences, a Manassas, VA, defense contractor with a major R&D lab in Cambridge, MA. Last week Aurora won a Small Business Innnovative Research contract from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for an initial study of the concept, which hinges on the development of an innovative cable system for retrieving so-called micro air vehicles (MAVs). The cable could be the solution to the biggest problem in aerial recovery scenarios: the speed mismatch between large and small craft.

“If you have a larger UAV, it can fly very fast for long distances, but it can’t fly slowly and look around in a city, for example,” says James Peverill, an embedded systems engineer at Aurora’s Cambridge lab. “But a smaller UAV can go down and look around at things more carefully. If you combine those two regimes, you can bring about a new capability.” The issue is that that “you can’t dock the two planes without some additional work,” says Peverill, because they can’t match speeds the way a fighter jet and a refueling tanker can.

You might not think that simply lowering a cable from a larger UAV would help, since the end of the cable would be moving just as fast as the mother ship. But Peverill and colleagues in the laboratory of MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics are investigating a twist on the idea—literally.

If the larger craft flies in circles, Peverill and his colleague believe, the circular motion, together with aerodynamic drag, will cause the lower end of the cable to trace a smaller circle—meaning that “the end of the cable will be traveling slower than the large UAV,” he says. So much slower, in fact, that a MAV could approach and dock with it, in the same way a fighter hooks into the drogue basket of a tanker’s refueling hose.

The approach, code-named Sky Cowboy, has never been tried with robotic vehicles, according to Peverill—but it’s likely to be less violent and less potentially damaging than other ideas for air-to-air retrieval, such as having a large UAV fly up behind an MAV and snag it with a hook.

Aurora’s nine-month Phase I grant of about $100,000 will allow Aurora and its research partner for Sky Cowboy, MIT Aero/Astro professor Jonathan How, to test the idea on a small scale using the Real-time indoor Autonomous Vehicle test Environment (RAVEN), a motion-capture facility at MIT’s Aerospace Controls Laboratory. (We last wrote about How when he was helping a team of students build MIT’s DARPA Urban Challenge robot car.) You’ve probably seen “making-of” videos about digitally animated Hollywood movies like The Polar Express or Beowulf, where actors dress up in body suits covered with targets and their recorded movements are used to guide the motion of digital models. RAVEN does the same thing with model aircraft.

“It’s very expensive and difficult to instrument a radio-controlled plane to know where it is in a room,” says Peverill. “But if you use the motion-capture system, you can know exactly where it is without adding anything to the plane except the targets.” For the Sky Cowboy tests, targets will also be attached to a cable dangling from a radio-controlled plane that’s flying in circles, allowing researchers to measure whether the end of the cable behaves as predicted.

The RAVEN data may also be used to construct a digital model that could enable the team to explore various configurations for the cable, says Peverill. If the results are encouraging, they could help Aurora lasso a much larger Phase 2 grant to fund development of a full-scale prototype system.

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OK, we’re big on robots around here. From iRobot’s landmark court case to Kiva’s shuffling warehouse bots, from the FIRST (For Inspiration & Recognition of Science & Technology) high-school robot competition to Hydroid’s Navy contract for robot submarines, we’ve been covering the business of bots in depth and on the ground since our inception. And why’s that?

Well, for one thing, robots are just cool. They capture our imagination like few other technologies do. Robots are R2-D2 saving the day, the Terminator delivering one-liners in an Austrian accent, and Iron Man flying through the air, guns ablaze. It’s why anyone ever got into the business in the first place.

What’s more, the greater Boston area has clearly established itself as one of the world’s leading centers for robotics. There are more than 150 companies, institutions, and research labs that deal in robots or robot components here. That adds up to more than 1,500 workers, $150 million in government contracts, and $250 million in annual sales, according to the official state organization presiding over it all—the Massachusetts Robotics Cluster, which is a subgroup of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, a non-profit that fosters entrepreneurship and promotes tech companies.

Not that it’s necessarily a boom time for robotics firms. Everywhere you look, budgets are tight. “It’s a bit tough for early stage companies,” says Paul Coster, an analyst at JPMorgan who watches iRobot. “Very few have viable business models.” To be successful in today’s climate, he adds, it’s becoming more important “to roll up and come to market with a proven model.”

With this state of the robotics union firmly in mind, we wanted to provide the definitive local guide. Following our stories on the greater Boston Internet video cluster and the hidden hub of music and technology, we wanted to track down every commercial outfit doing significant work in robotics—everything from mobile to medical robots, software to hardware, electromechanics to exoskeletons. We drew the line if the company made sensors, electronics, or energy sources that could be used by robots, but did not focus primarily on robot products.

Looking at the list, a few things leapt out at us. The majority of firms (at least 13 out of 24) get substantial support from defense contracts, while most others serve niche markets. Local companies are strong in mobile robots and vehicles, growing in medical robots, and not as strong in industrial applications. We’ve also included a couple of non-companies—organizations that we feel are making a direct impact on the industry. But this is by no means a comprehensive list. If we’ve missed something, please leave us a comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

We’re also working on putting together a networking event to bring the local robotics community together to talk about the pressing issues, and maybe raise a few of our own—like what are the potentially transformative applications for robots in society that nobody is thinking of? In the meantime, enjoy our guide…

Aurora Flight Sciences
Cambridge, MA
Vertical take-off unmanned aerial vehicles for defense and aerospace applications. The company is headquartered in Manassas, VA, but established an R&D center in Kendall Square in 2005.

Barrett Technology
Cambridge, MA
Best known for its WAM (Whole-Arm Manipulation), a state-of-the-art robotic arm, used for rehabilitation and manufacturing applications such as spray-painting. It might even be used to help repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Barrett began in 1990 as a spinoff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Black-I Robotics
Tyngsborough, MA
Incorporated in 2006, Black-I develops unmanned ground vehicles for security and defense. Its robots have been tested by the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad at Logan Airport for detecting and disrupting car bombs.

Bluefin
Cambridge, MA
Autonomous underwater vehicles for detecting surface mines, and other defense applications using sonar and hydrophones. The company was spun out of MIT in 1997, and became a subsidiary of Battelle Memorial Institute in 2005.

Boston Dynamics
Cambridge, MA
Founded in 1992 out of MIT, Boston Dynamics focuses on human movement simulations and legged robots that can walk and run over rough terrain. A recent YouTube video of the company’s remarkable Big Dog quadruped robot has attracted millions of viewers—and generated a hilarious parody. …Next Page »

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Talk about a long flight. While the world’s longest passenger jet trip (the 18-hour, 40-minute journey from Newark to Singapore) may be a killer, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has hired a group of organizations with Massachusetts operations, including Aurora Flight Sciences, Draper Laboratories, and BAE Systems, to build a plane that can stay in the air for five years.

Manassas, VA-based Aurora (which has a research lab in Cambridge, MA—I profiled it here in October) announced today that it has been selected under DARPA’s “Vulture” program to help build an unmanned aircraft that can keep a 1,000-pound payload of camera and radio equipment aloft in the stratosphere for five years without landing. (Apparently the military has run out of inspiring birds to name aircraft after, and has now turned to the unsavory ones.)

The plane would need to be powered by solar energy, fuel cells, and/or extremely efficient internal combustion engines, since DARPA has ruled out nuclear or radiation-based power systems. The craft will mainly function as a surveillance tool—with a lifetime approaching that of some orbital satellites. Indeed, DARPA calls Vulture a “retaskable, persistent pseudo-satellite…in an aircraft package.”

Aurora’s design concept for the Vulture, called Odysseus, works on solar energy during the day and stored solar energy at night. Aurora teamed on its proposal with Cambridge, MA-based Draper Labs, which will develop high-reliability electronics and control systems for Odysseus, and BAE Systems, which has offices in Acton, MA and will work on payloads and sensors. A fourth partner, Sierra Nevada Corporation of Sparks, NV, specializes in autonomous refueling systems.

For the first phase of the Vulture project, expected to last 12 months, the Odysseus team members will need to come up with a basic design and build scale-model demonstration craft. Phase 2, expected to run from 2009 to 2012, will culminate in the testing of a demonstrator that can stay aloft for three months. DARPA wants the finished Vulture craft—which will only be built if the Phase 2 tests are successful—to be capable of station-keeping (circling over a set location such as a battlefield) 99 percent of the time at an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet, where 100- to 200-mile-per-hour winds are common.

The inspiration for Vulture comes partly from experimental unmanned planes designed and tested by NASA, including Helios, a single-wing, solar-powered craft that set an altitude record in 2001 by flying above 96,000 feet for 40 minutes. (In a later test Helios broke up and crashed into the ocean.)

I wasn’t able to get through to anyone at Aurora for comment about the DARPA award, but the company said in its press announcement that it foresees “a broad range of potential applications” for Odysseus-type craft, other than military surveillance. “Prime among these are global climate change research, weather monitoring, and regional-scale telecommunications,” the company said.

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Unbeknownst to the lunch crowds who fill the streets around the Cambridge Marriott every weekday, Kendall Square has its very own Area 51: a mini-aircraft hangar on the fourteenth floor of One Broadway. Part of the newly opened R&D outpost of Manassas, VA-based Aurora Flight Sciences, the space is used to test unpiloted machines such as a UFO-shaped surveillance craft that can take off and land vertically, a fold-up airplane designed to fly over the plains of Mars, and a makeshift glider that uses bat-like echolocation to avoid obstacles. Aurora engineers fly the smallest models around the indoor mini-hangar and truck larger prototypes out to nearby airfields such as Hanscom Air Force Base.

I toured the facility last Thursday courtesy of an old high school friend, Tim Dawson-Townsend, who located me recently after seeing my stories in Xconomy. Tim was at MIT when I was at Harvard, then joined the Air Force. Now he’s a program manager at Aurora, where he works on a range of defense-related projects that run from the Excalibur, a vertical-takeoff attack plane that doesn’t care whether it flies right-side-up or upside-down, to the UFO-like GoldenEye (okay, it’s really shaped more like a backyard barbeque or Oscar the Grouch’s trash can from Sesame Street than a UFO).

Dawson-Townsend says Aurora is a great place to work because, while it has a profitable business building aerostructures such as the carbon-composite fuselage for Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), the company also has a strong R&D sensibility, having started out building high-altitude scientific craft for NASA. “Everybody and his brother is building a UAV these days,” Dawson-Townsend says. But few companies, in his view, bring Aurora’s sense of experiment and adventure to the industry.

Aurora CEO John Langford founded the company in 1989 after several years managing MIT’s Daedalus human-powered airplane project. “John realized that if you put engines on these things, we could do some interesting science,” says Thomas Vaneck, Aurora’s vice president of research and development and the leader of the Cambridge lab. The company worked with NASA throughout the 1990s on the Perseus series of research UAVs, which set world altitude records. But as NASA’s research interests changed, and especially as the conflict in Iraq got underway, Aurora’s focus shifted to defense, Vaneck told me. The company acquired a former Northrop Grumman facility in Bridgeport, WV, for manufacturing metal airplane parts, built an adjacent facility for making carbon-composite parts, and won big contracts developing components for the unmanned Global Hawk as well as the E2-C Hawkeye early-warning aircraft and the EA-6B Prowler electronic-warfare plane.

UAVs such as General Atomics’ famous MQ-1 Predator have performed so well in surveillance, targeting, and attack roles in Iraq that the military services want manufacturers to explore more ways such craft can assist units in the field, Vaneck says. “Our customers are demanding that these technologies do a lot more,” he says. And that’s what led the company to set up an R&D center in Cambridge, where engineers can easily collaborate with members of MIT’s world-renowned Aero/Astro department. For example, Aurora is working with MIT’s Jonathan How to explore software algorithms for planning and coordinating the action of fleets of UAVs in real time. (Xconomy last spoke with How about MIT’s entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge robot car competition, which also benefits from his work on planning algorithms.) “Through osmosis, we’ll be able to extract interesting technologies and put them into the company’s products,” says Vaneck.

One fascinating product is the GoldenEye, which is essentially a flying ducted fan that generates enough lift to carry a small payload such as an optical/infrared camera and a laser designator (used to “light up” targets that can then be destroyed by missiles). On the ground, the GoldenEye perches on four legs. When powered up, it leaps from the ground like a helicopter, then tilts forward and flies with the help of two stubby wings. (Click here to see a video of the GoldenEye in flight.)

The craft operates completely autonomously, with operators specifying only where it should go. It’s small enough that soldiers could fit two on the back of an SUV. “If you’re a company commander, you don’t have actual control over a Predator” or other existing military UAV, Dawson-Townsend explains. The Air Force controls all craft that fly over 3,000 feet—in fact, Predators in Iraq are usually controlled via satellite by pilots based in Las Vegas, NV, of all places. The GoldenEye, by contrast, would fly low, under the control of soldiers who might need it to peek over a hill or locate snipers.

The conflict in Iraq makes money for brand-new UAV systems scarce, but Vaneck says that Aurora has been invited to show off the GoldenEye at a military technology demonstration scheduled for the spring. There, it hopes to win a contract that would allow it to complete development and testing of the device, build more demonstration units, and eventually go into production. “We think we can save lives by having this sort of asset in the conflict,” says Vaneck.

A scaled-down, Kevlar-skinned version of the GoldenEye is one of several craft currently inhabiting Aurora’s 14th-floor mini-hangar. Dawson-Townsend also showed me a scale model of the Mars Flyer, which is designed to unfold from a rocket’s nose cone as it parachutes into the Martian atmosphere. NASA has put plans for an airborne Mars mission on hold—but if the mission is ever revived, Aurora’s plane might be the one cruising over Olympus Mons or the Valles Marineris.

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