Northrop Grumman said today the Pentagon has awarded a planned low-rate, initial production contract to procure three unmanned Fire Scouts helicopters developed in San Diego. The Naval Air Systems Command in Patuxent River, MD, awarded the contract, which is not to exceed $40 million, under the Navy’s vertical takeoff and landing tactical unmanned aerial vehicle program. The work scheduled for completion in March 2011. As we reported here, the Navy plans to conduct a final technical evaluation of the Fire Scout program early this year, with operational evaluations expected sometime after that.

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In 1994, the Pentagon awarded a contract to develop a new type of unmanned aircraft to a three-year-old company in San Diego. The idea behind the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration was to build a more robust version of a drone that a former Israeli aircraft designer had developed in the 1980s. The result was the Predator, an unmanned surveillance aircraft that has become a mainstay of U.S. military forces, and which is renowned for its role in Iraq and Afghanistan.

San Diego’s General Atomics Aeronautical Systems has been steadily expanding the aircraft’s capabilities ever since, and the Predator’s role has grown from the CIA and U.S. Air Force, to include the Navy and Army. The private company embarked on a new course, though, on Sept. 1, 2005, when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security selected the Predator for a new role—as a robot on air patrol above the borders of the United States itself.

Until now, the CBP mission has focused on the U.S. border with Mexico and in the Caribbean. The agency flies Predators from a base in Sierra Vista, AZ, where it maintains four of the unmanned aircraft. But the mission entered a new phase in recent weeks, as CBP gears up to begin Predator air patrols along the North Dakota border with Canada.

A border patrol Predator

“This is a first deployment to get the lay of the land and see how well it operates,” said CBP Air and Marine Assistant Commissioner Michael Kostelnik, a retired Air Force major general. He says pilots who fly the aircraft remotely from a new CBP unmanned aircraft operations center in Grand Forks, ND, will have to gain experience, for example, landing a Predator on icy, windswept runways in winter.

Kostelnik told me it’s also trickier for a Predator pilot to detect ice building up on the aircraft’s wings, because they’re not in the cockpit. He says one of the pilots in Arizona who flew a Predator into Hurricane Gustav in September realized ice was building up …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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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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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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