Birds of prey helped inspire the idea for flying DARPA drones that could easily navigate treacherous and cluttered environments such as unstable buildings.
In the past, navigating these types of environments has required using manned vehicles, which can put human lives at risk. In order to remedy this, DARPA issued a Broad Agency Announcement solicitation today for the Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program to develop algorithms for small aerial drones that could navigate complicated environments.
"Birds of prey and flying insects exhibit the kinds of capabilities we want for small UAVs," said Mark Micire, DARPA program manager. "Goshawks, for example, can fly very fast through a dense forest without smacking into a tree. Many insects, too, can dart and hover with incredible speed and precision. The goal of the FLA program is to explore non-traditional perception and autonomy methods that would give small UAVs the capacity to perform in a similar way, including an ability to easily navigate tight spaces at high speed and quickly recognize if it had already been in a room before."
If these algorithms are successful, they could reduce the amount of processing power and human intervention required in drone navigation. The focus of the program will be to reduce UAVs dependence on external sources rather than make the devices more compact, so DARPA will provide the small UAV testbed as government-furnished equipment for performers selected for the demonstration.
"Urban and disaster relief operations would be obvious key beneficiaries, but applications for this technology could extend to a wide variety of missions using small and large unmanned systems linked together with manned platforms as a system of systems," said Stefanie Tompkins, director of DARPA's Defense Sciences Office. "By enabling unmanned systems to learn 'muscle memory' and perception for basic tasks like avoiding obstacles, it would relieve overload and stress on human operators so they can focus on supervising the systems and executing the larger mission."
A webcast Proposers Day is scheduled for Jan.6, 2015, DARPA announced.
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