DARPA UAVForge

DARPA have created a crowd sourced sUAS design competition with a $100,000 dollar prize. They are now looking for companies to develop the winning designs.

This is the second major ticket competition to be announced this year for sUAS. The Chinese carrier landing competition carries a total prize fund of $378,000. To date the Outback Challenge in Australia has been the UAV competition of choice. It will be interesting to see if these newcomers can generate the same amount of interest and support from the sUAS community.

Researchers at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are asking industry to develop a small, bird-like unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) small enough to fit in a soldier’s rucksack and able to fly to and perch on useful locations for several hours near targets of interest to provide continuous, real-time persistent surveillance without help from human operators.

The craft must fly a distance of at least two miles avoiding obstacles and then sit on a building for at  three hours observing before coming home in time for tea and medals.

Here are the teams (along with all videos submitted by each) that have made it up to Milestone 3 – Live Demo Video:

Adaptive Flight Inc
AeroQuad.com
ATMOS
DHAKSHA
Electric UAV
evaForge
Extractor X
GremLion
HALO
icarusLabs
MAVerick
Navy EOD
Penumbra
Phase Analytic
ReferenceTEK
sq-4 recon
SwiftSight
VoRPaL
WIDrone
Zamalec