The innovation economy took center stage last week in San Diego, where new innovations were announced in mobile apps, unmanned aircraft, and new technology platforms developed for smart grid operating systems. We’ve got it wrapped for you here.

—Diego-based Cymer (NASDAQ: CYMI), which is considered a bellwether for the semiconductor industry, said during a fourth-quarter conference call last week that several of its chip-making customers had recently raised their capital expenditure projections for 2011. Cymer makes advanced, deep-ultraviolet lasers for use in photolithography to make chips. “We believe this increase in ‘capex’ investment will translate into continued growth as the year proceeds,” CEO Bob Akins told investors, analysts, and journalists.

—Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC), which operates an engineering and development center for unmanned aircraft in San Diego, said its stealthy X-47B unmanned combat air system (UCAS) successfully flew its long-delayed first flight at Edwards Air Force Base on Friday. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is intended to serve as a carrier-based combat strike aircraft.

—-I profiled Fluorotronics, an 11-year-old startup in Vista, CA, founded by Russian immigrant Olga Sharts to commercialize a specialized type of laser spectroscopy that is tuned to the unique spectroscopic signal of carbon-fluorine bonds. Such bonds are found only in manmade products, including pharmaceutical products. Carbon-fluorine bonds also are used to make Teflon and other advanced materials, including microelectronics, semiconductors, chemicals, and aerospace materials.

—Wade described how innovation and entrepreneurship have become the bywords for efforts in various quarters to drive economic resurgence in the United States. He noted the Startup America initiative launched by the White House, an unexpected source of funding for the Y Combinator venture incubator program, an expansion of the TechStars operation, and much more.

—Mountain View, CA-based Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU) has developed more than 15 mobile apps that are focused on … Next Page »

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Octobers have been cruel to San Diego.

The infamous Cedar Fire started on a Saturday evening, Oct. 25, 2003, and raced more than 30 miles from the Cleveland National Forest into the San Diego suburbs by the next morning. The firestorm destroyed 2,232 homes and killed 15 people before it was contained nine days later. Then there was the Witch fire of 2007, part of a cluster of wildfires that erupted on October 21, killed seven, and destroyed 1,500 homes and forced the evacuation of 500,000 residents throughout San Diego County. That was a bigger evacuation than in New Orleans in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina attained its dubious distinction as the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

Still, we’re getting better at dealing with firestorms in San Diego—and natural disasters in general—as innovations in sensor technologies, wireless networks, and predictive analytics have helped provide more accurate forecasts and better warnings. And much of the technology is being developed in San Diego.

Earlier this month, for example, San Diego Gas & Electric officials held a press briefing to explain that the utility had spent $1.1 million over the past year to add 93 anemometers (for measuring wind speed) to an existing network of 16 radio-automated weather stations throughout San Diego County. As a result, San Diego County now has the densest network of weather instrumentation in the country, according to Brian D’Agostino, a full-time weather forecaster hired by SDG&E last year.

The increased instrumentation gives SDG&E’s operations center more detailed information about wind conditions in specific locales. Utility regulators allow SDG&E to shut off power to specific transmission lines when local wind speeds exceed 56 mph, according to Dave Geier, SDG&E’s vice president of electric transmission and distribution. Wind speeds above 56 mph increase the odds that blowing debris or swaying trees will bring down a power line, according to utility officials.

A more sophisticated wireless sensor network, such as the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network developed by researchers at UC San Diego, serves as a model of the type of network that could provide even more data, including imagery, that could help in the prediction of and response to disasters, according to Hans-Werner Braun of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Braun says the network demonstrates how a remote sensing systems can be effectively networked throughout remote areas of San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial Counties. Braun, who is overseeing the project, has described it as a wireless backbone that uses Internet routers on mountaintops, interconnected via wireless links.

Braun, who was the chief network architect for the satellite network conceived by Bellevue, WA-based Teledesic in the 1990s, uses the system for … Next Page »

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At Northrop Grumman’s unmanned systems development center in suburban San Diego, some folks are describing a $33 million contract that was announced today as “DARPA hard.”

DARPA is an acronym for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the two-year contract awarded to Northrop Grumman calls for demonstrating the feasibility of using one high-altitude unmanned Global Hawk aircraft to refuel another. The UAV-to-UAV in-flight refueling is to be completely autonomous, with the robotic aircraft using GPS navigation and optical tracking systems to approach, link up, and complete the refueling procedure. If successful, the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) air-to-air refueling will mark a historic milestone—for both aviation and robotics.

UAV-UAV aerial refueling (photo illustration)

While mid-air refueling has been done with piloted aircraft since 1923, it remains a tricky and hazardous maneuver that requires extensive pilot training. In the case of two robotic aircraft, both UAVs must automatically adjust to turbulence and other environmental uncertainties while maneuvering in the thin air of high altitude (the Global Hawk’s cruising altitude is 65,000 feet).

“So this one definitely fits” the category of DARPA hard, says Mark Gamache, the San Diego-based director of advanced concepts for Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. In a telephone interview, Gamache tells me DARPA hard “means they only like to work on projects that nobody else would do.”

The Global Hawk was itself the product of DARPA-funded development during the 1990s, with the first seven aircraft built in … Next Page »

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New industries like cleantech and mobile health are changing the face of San Diego’s innovation scene. Better catch up on all that’s happening before you don’t recognize it anymore.

—The wind power industry is now in the doldrums, after soaring last year to a record number of wind turbine installations. The industry’s boom and bust cycles are so jarring that the American Wind Energy Association is calling on Congress to enact policies to bring more stability to the market. The latest lull in new orders has prompted the Knight & Carver Wind Group of National City, CA, to lay off a third of its workforce at a wind turbine blade manufacturing plant near Sioux Falls, S.D.

—San Diego’s Avalon Ventures, which has embarked on raising between $150 million and $200 million for its ninth venture fund, gets a lot of attention for its investments in life sciences startups. But Avalon invests about half of its funds in Web and wireless deals like E-Band Communications, Cloudkick, and Nabbr.

—Google Ventures stepped out of the shadows to talk with reporters about the corporate venture fund and its investing strategy. In San Diego, Google Ventures has sunk money into V-Vehicle and OpenCandy. In a Q&A transcript, Bill Maris, the fund’s managing partner, said the fund’s goal is to invest roughly $100 million in startups each year.

—San Diego’s Envision Solar International, which specializes in architectural and project planning of renewable energy projects, began trading on the over-the-counter bulletin board market. The company’s shares trade under the symbol EVSI.

—The mobile health industry will meet in La Jolla tomorrow for the 5th Annual Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance Convergence Summit. While a survey by TripleTree, a Minnesota banking firm, shows the industry is still emerging; the WLSA itself became a full-time, member-supported trade group earlier this year.

—Some of the proceeds from a $53 million deal the J. Craig Venter Institute did in Maryland could help the research institute move ahead with its plans for a laboratory on the UC San Diego campus. The Venter Institute sold its five-building campus in Rockville, MD, and then leased it back.

—Larry Smarr, who heads the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at UC San Diego was among the featured speakers at a health IT conference that OVP Venture Partners hosted at its headquarters in Kirkland, WA. Smarr said biologists, physicians, and computer scientists rarely pool their brainpower in productive ways to tackle problems as hard as health IT.

—At a time when the Pentagon is pushing unmanned aircraft makers to develop a new generation of relatively inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles, a startup near Seattle called LaserMotive has outlined a way to use a laser to beam power to unmanned aircraft. That way, they won’t have to land to refuel.

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You want some real tech? Here’s some real tech: LaserMotive, the Kent, WA-based startup founded by physicists Jordin Kare and Tom Nugent, has published a white paper on how to beam power to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) so they don’t have to land and refuel, or change batteries. The idea is to recharge UAVs while they’re in the air using a laser power source from the ground. Presumably such “eternal” UAVs that never need to land would be very useful for military and reconnaissance operations.

In San Diego, which is a regional hub of UAV expertise, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that defense contractors like Predator manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Northrop Grumman’s unmanned systems business are hustling to develop a new generation of relatively inexpensive UAVs. Most larger UAVs, like the Predator and Fire Scout, a robotic helicopter made by Northrop Grumman, run on gasoline, but smaller ones can run on electricity and are quieter.

That’s where LaserMotive comes into play. This inventive little company, which I first wrote about in-depth last month, has developed power-beaming technology using laser diodes to transmit energy through the air, and specially constructed solar cells to receive the beam and turn it into usable electricity. LaserMotive demonstrated its technology by winning the Level 1 prize of the NASA Power Beaming challenge last fall (part of its Space Elevator Games), in which it powered a robot to climb up a kilometer-long cable using only lasers from the ground. (The company will go for the Level 2 prize later this year.)

But powering UAVs and other practical devices has been the company’s plan for a while, and this is its first big market opportunity. Nugent, LaserMotive’s co-founder and president, said in a statement that his company’s plan is “an important step not only in powering UAVs, but in extending their abilities, improving their endurance and enabling new missions.” He added, “It is especially viable for high-altitude, long endurance unmanned aerial vehicles and other types of aircraft that need power over a long period of time.”

If you want to know the technical specs and capabilities of LaserMotive’s system (things like range, power levels, and efficiency), read the company’s report. But it seems like an intriguing market. The industry research firm Teal Group says the market for UAVs is expected to grow worldwide from $4.9 billion to $11.5 billion annually in the next 10 years.

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Yesterday, we ran Part 1 of my interview with Michelle Crumm, co-founder and chief business officer for fuel cell manufacturer Adaptive Materials of Ann Arbor, MI. We discussed how it took a decade of old-fashioned hard work to get to a point where the company is signing deals to supply the military with the fuel cells needed for unmanned aerial vehicles and robots helping to fight the war in Afghanistan. Today, in Part 2, Crumm talks about how, despite the 7,100 resumes she received for nine open engineering positions, the company has had difficulty finding workers who fit her company’s culture.

Xconomy: I’ve not only been reading about these recent contracts Adaptive Materials has been getting, but also the fact that you’re hiring new engineers.

Michelle Crumm: If you can put that in there, I’d love to have a great systems engineer.

X: Absolutely. You know, the way I first heard about your company was that it had been Tweeted a few times that you were on a resume-gathering blitz, looking to hire nine new engineers. How many resumes have you collected?

MC: We had 7,100 resumes during that resume blitz. We pulled in 90 people to come in for short interviews, then we pulled in 20 of those to come in for day-long interviews, and we ended up hiring five people. So, we still have four open positions that we’re trying to fill.

X: You must have a pool of a lot of qualified candidates. There are a lot of talented engineers in the area who are out of work. How was the quality of the resumes?

MC: Well, I think the biggest challenge is that there are a ton of really smart engineers out there—and some of them are employed and some of them are not employed, unfortunately. The biggest challenge is can we find the right cultural fit, and that is a lot harder than just having a smart engineer that’s out of work. You know, it’s so much bigger than that. Do they have the right attitude? Can they come in and make decisions? Are they an empowered thinker? How quickly can they learn? So, it’s all those things that we’re interviewing for. It’s the core values of the company that’s our weed-out process. They’re all intelligent, they all have their plaques on their walls, there are great, talented, wonderful people out there, but just because they’re great, talented, wonderful people does not mean that they’re a great cultural fit for our organization. We’re still small enough that every single person, you know, they have to fit in culturally. Otherwise, they can tip over the apple cart.

X: Sounds like you still have that startup mentality. People have to be flexible, think on their feet.

MC: Yes, that’s the way we hire. Our technicians out on the floor, they may have a high school diploma but they need to have a strong enough personality to push back to the engineers and say, “This is not a manufacturable design. Let’s work on this together to try to get something that I can actually put together a lot easier.” I don’t need a technician. I need a technician that’s confident enough that they can stand up for themselves, that they can talk to the engineers and work together to get these products so they design for manufacturability. So much of it is just a personality issue.

X: Let me broaden the conversation a little more and talk about the funding environment. Venture capital in this area has been pretty dismal for a while. It’s improving a little bit, maybe for early stage companies or companies right out of academia. But you’ve mentioned before that there is gap for companies like yours. What needs to be done, culturally, to change that in this area?

MC: I’ve never thought that it made sense to have venture capitalists—we always call it OPM around here, Other People’s Money. Well, Other People’s Money, to me, is something that you take … Next Page »

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Something strange has been happening over at Adaptive Materials, a fuel cell developer based in Ann Arbor, MI. During the past few months, as everybody talks about how to get things moving forward in Southeast Michigan, Adaptive has been, well, actually moving forward.

A contract worth a few million from the Department of Defense here, an award worth another few million from the Air Force there, and more money to develop a product for the recreational vehicle market.

And then there’s the company’s recent resume-gathering blitz, hiring nine new engineers. That’s news in these parts (the company received an amazing 7,100 resumes for those nine plum jobs). So, I decided to find out what kind of magic is going on over at Adaptive Materials. I talked to Michelle Crumm, co-founder and chief business officer, and found out that there is no magic happening there at all. The success is the result of a decade of old-fashioned hard work and building of relationships.

Crumm also tells me that Adaptive just might be a victim of its own success now. The company made a decision 10 years ago not to seek angel or venture capital funding. She did not think it was right to use what she calls OPM (Other People’s Money) to fund a “wild and crazy idea.” A decade later, it’s no longer a wild and crazy idea. It’s a business getting ready to move from manufacturing a few hundred units to thousands. And the company could really use some non-government funding at this point. Trouble is, they’re just not wild and crazy enough to attract VC-style investors.

I’ll let Crumm explain what she means in her own words. Here’s an edited transcript of my recent talk with Crumm. Below is Part 1. We’ll run Part 2 later in the week.

Xconomy: First, let’s talk about your company, then we can broaden the conversation a little bit. Can you tell me the “elevator pitch” version of what your company does?

Michelle Crumm: Adaptive Materials started 10 years ago, and we’ve been focused on solid oxide fuel cells development. So, we’re an alternative energy development company. Our focus is portable power. In our early stage, we were primarily focused on military portable power for soldiers. Early successes in those programs, in the early 2000s, led us to getting to other power ranges—enough to power robots and airplanes.

So we provide [products] to “eyes-in-the-sky.” They get more power  when they’re flying unmanned aerial vehicles and longer duration capabilities when they have robots in the field. So, to protect them from IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices], they can send robots out. About 12 hours is our most recent demonstration. So, about 10X longer mission for a robot in the field than a battery.

X: Is that being used in the field now?

MC: We have a small number of units out in different locations throughout the world for unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles.

X: From what I’ve heard, there’s more of an emphasis on small, portable robotics in Afghanistan because of the mountainous terrain.

MC: Exactly. That’s been significant, just the change between the two wars. There’s definitely … Next Page »

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Think it’s possible to shoot down a swarm of buzzing mosquitoes in mid-air? Or maybe you want to power up a remote flying vehicle? Tom Nugent is your man. The Seattle-area entrepreneur just might be the most versatile guy with a laser you’ve ever met.

Yes, a laser. Until recently, Nugent worked in the laboratory of Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, the invention company led by Nathan Myhrvold, where one of his projects was the so-called “photonic fence.” This effort has gotten lots of media attention, most recently for an impressive demo at the TED conference in February. That’s where Myhrvold showed a video of a laser burning the wings off a flying mosquito in super slow-motion. The idea is this technology, implemented on a larger scale, could help prevent the spread of malaria or protect crops against flying pests.

But Nugent’s focus now is on something that might be more practical: power beaming. That means using lasers to deliver energy to remote sensors, vehicles, or base stations. It’s a two-way trick: the receiver has to have a solar cell to convert the laser’s energy into electricity. But as long as the solar cell is viable, the technology could be useful in any situation where installing a wire is impractical, where batteries run down, or where it’s too expensive to truck in fuel.

That’s really just the beginning, to Nugent’s mind. One of his ultimate goals is to be able to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth from space, presumably to help solve global-scale energy problems. For now, though, he’ll settle for beaming power to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other remote devices, including very early technology that could help scientists develop something called a space elevator. These ideas, in sum, have turned into a small company called LaserMotive, based in Kent, WA.

Before dismissing these projects as far-fetched, a little background is required. The idea of power beaming has been around for decades. But advances in cheaper and more energy-efficient diode lasers have made it possible to pursue the idea commercially in the past few years. Even the rise of laser hair removal products (which you might see on late night TV) have helped things move forward. So in 2007, Nugent and fellow physicist (and Intellectual Ventures veteran) Jordin Kare, an expert on laser rocket propulsion and optics who worked on the “Star Wars” nuclear-missile defense system in the 1980s—decided to make a business out of power beaming, and co-founded LaserMotive.

“We think we can produce revenue while we get experience,” says Nugent, LaserMotive’s president.

Their first project: tackling the power beaming aspect of NASA’s “Space Elevator Games.” If you don’t know what a space elevator is, that’s OK—it doesn’t exist yet. The über-futuristic idea is to have a cable anchored to the ground, extending thousands of miles into space, that could be used to launch payloads into orbit. The space end would be unattached, and the Earth’s rotation would keep it taut so a robot “elevator” could move up and down the cable, carrying equipment. Sure, this would take billions of dollars and a few decades to get working, but it could ultimately make space operations much cheaper than using rockets. That’s the idea, at least.

If a space elevator is ever going to work, it will need power at multiple steps along the way. So, at “Level 1” of the NASA Power Beaming Challenge, held last November in Mojave, CA, Nugent and Kare’s team used a ground-based infrared laser to beam energy to specially designed solar cells aboard an 11-pound robot (see photo, left) driven by an electric motor. (All power must come from the ground.) The robot climbed a 900-meter length of metal cable suspended from a helicopter. Nugent and Kare’s was the only team to make it to the top with an average climbing speed of more than 2 meters per second—their robot went nearly 4 meters per second (9 mph)—beating out two other teams, who failed to reach the top. The prize was $900,000 (before taxes, Nugent laments—yes, it’s that time of year).

The upcoming “Level 2” competition will be held later this year, … Next Page »

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DroidWorks, the stealth-mode robotics company launched early in 2009 by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, has changed its name to CyPhy Works and has won a $2.4 million research award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to study ways of using unmanned aerial vehicles to inspect civil infrastructure such as highways, bridges and dams, according to a story today in Mass High Tech. The grant will allow the company to hire more robotics engineers, Greiner told the publication.

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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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