DARPA Supports Development of Degradable Cargo Delivery Drones for Mission Critical Supplies
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/19th January 2017, DRONE MARKET WATCHTM/ Delivering humanitarian services in hard to access areas remains extremely challenging. Agencies engaged in these activities are hampered by two major obstacles: a lack of reliable information on humanitarian needs in inaccessible areas, and challenges in gaining access to areas beset by insecurity and conflict. To address this situation, humanitarian actors need new methods to properly account for needs in hard to access areas and devise ways to deliver services to the populations located in these areas.
Medical supplies in hard to access areas currently requires the use of large, parachute-based delivery systems that must be packed out after receipt of the payload both for operational security and environmental concerns.
DARPA’s innovations achieved in the Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program, which has developed self-destructing electronic components, the Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems (ICARUS) program aims to elaborate concept for degradable drones (UAVs) that can make precise deliveries of mission critical supplies and have capability to degrade in a few days after delivery. If ICARUS is successful, small items, including batteries, communications devices, or medical supplies – especially those requiring maintenance of a cold chain – could be supplied/resupplied using low-cost, disposable aircraft to military or humanitarian assistance teams operating in hard to access areas.
The ICARUS program addresses these challenges by calling for the design, prototype development and demonstration of autonomous air-delivery vehicles capable of delivering intact a 3-pound payload with 10 meters accuracy with respect to a GPS-programmed location. Within hours of payload delivery, the vehicle, which should be no more than 3 meters in its longest dimension, must physically vanish. The 26-month program will culminate in a final Government field-test of fully vanishing, precision air-delivery prototypes.
The primary technical categories of the ICARUS program are aerodynamics and materials. It will take creative aerodynamic design and materials engineering to minimize overall capability tradeoffs that the interplay of these two interacting arenas is likely to require. For example, engineering materials that are stable enough to meet flight specifications, yet unstable enough to undergo the vanishing requirement, is a tall order.
Within a larger context, the ICARUS program addresses the fundamental question of whether large, functional structures can be deliberately designed to disappear soon after their mission is completed. If this capability can be developed, it could have impacts in many core areas where a leave-behind would have environmental and/or unintended logistical consequences.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. DARPA-funded projects have provided significant technologies that influenced many non-military fields, such as computer networking and the basis for the modern Internet, and graphical user interfaces in information technology. DARPA is independent of other military research and development and reports directly to senior Department of Defense management. DARPA has about 240 employees, of whom approximately 15 are in management, and close to 140 are technical staff.
More information about cargo delivery drones for mission critical supplies you may read here: Drone Market Reports
