DARPA to Lockheed: Build us a maple seed-shaped UAV

Perhaps worried that their bid proposal for insect cyborgs will never pan out, the wacky minds at DARPA are now looking at the humble maple tree to provide inspiration for their future fleet of tiny surveillance drones. The agency has just awarded Lockheed Martin a 10-month contract to develop maple seed-shaped UAVs known as remote-controlled nano air vehicles (or NAVs, for short) that can be deployed from a hovercraft and whirl around urban battlefields snapping pictures and confusing enemies who have never seen a maple tree. DARPA is stipulating that the single-blade NAVs be equipped with a self-stabilizing wireless camera, yet weigh only 0.07 ounces and be capable of traveling 1,100 feet with the help of an onboard chemical rocket. Seems like a lot to ask from such a minuscule device, but the $1.7 million DARPA is shelling out will probably be enough of an incentive for Lockheed to get the job done.

[Via Boing Boing]

[james @ Jul 22nd 2006 9:45AM]

1.7 million...that's it? good thing concepts of this were already built in the 60s and the work would be to scale them down.

-james

[grable @ Jul 22nd 2006 9:56AM]

Doesnt anyone else find this a bit worrying? it seems all DARPA and the likes want to create is super weapons and surveillance gadgets, somehow i feel these will ultimatly be used against civillians more than in a battlefield :(

[Zorak @ Jul 22nd 2006 12:01PM]

I, for one, welcome our all-seeing robomaple-seed overlords.

[Sol @ Jul 22nd 2006 1:44PM]

Zorak.......Perfect!

[Bill O'Reilly @ Jul 22nd 2006 1:50PM]

Great so now people in conflict areas are going to be on the lookout for maple trees and seeds and cut them down. Nice! Why not do hornet UAVs instead? No one would dare mess with that thing. Is it that hard to emulate the flutter of a live hornet's wings?

[Jake @ Jul 22nd 2006 1:58PM]

Grable,

In case you haven't thought about this, nearly all of
our technological advancements in the past 30 or 40 years (computers, internet, GPS, cell phones, robots, stealth, teflon, kevlar, i.e. all things cool) have been developed with military uses being the primary
incentive. Why? Because the governments are the ones with the money, and can afford to fund the research and the large contracts. If it weren't for the various militaries around the world, our technology
would be nowhere near what it is today.So yes, the government is probably spying on you with all their different types of crazy gadgets, and yes, they do have the ability to launch a missle from hundreds of miles away and land it within 3 feet of a moving target (i.e. you), but don't worry about that. It's been this way for years, and there's no turning back, so sit back and enjoy the side-effects of military advancements like the internet and personal teleportation (soon to come I bet).

[Mike @ Jul 22nd 2006 2:16PM]

1.7 mil is not a lot of money.

[Egfrow @ Jul 22nd 2006 2:49PM]

DARPA and the likes want to create is super weapons and surveillance gadgets

Sure grable,
That's what DARPA is supposed to do. It's an acronym that means Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I don't know about it being a 'Super Weapon'. People will kind of nice malple seeds following them around in the house. It's a battle field intelligence gathering system. Cockroachs are more more spying in peoples homes. Yes, 1.7 million is not allot of money for something like this

[Dan @ Jul 22nd 2006 2:58PM]

For those who are worried about being spied on by the government, let's do some math.

Lets say hypothetically that the NSA monitors the actions of every single American. This program would cost billions and billions in equipment and manpower. But anyways, lets also say that there are 5000 terrorists in the USA, that the NSA would like to find. Now with all their fancy equipment and monitoring devices, they must be pretty good at telling who's a terrorist and who's not, right? So maybe they have a 99.9% accuracy rating for differentiating Jihad Jafir from regular Joe. Well there are about 300 million people in the United States. That means 300 000 false positives and 4995 real terrorists. So for every terrorist they arrest, they'd be arresting 60 regular citizens. So either they arrest all 304 995 together and people get really mad or they let the terrorists get away.

My point is that mass surveilance is a statistically useless way of finding a small number of people inside a large population.

[Beowulf @ Jul 22nd 2006 3:18PM]

"... and confusing enemies who have never seen a maple tree."

Hilarious.

[Nigel @ Jul 22nd 2006 3:48PM]

"Doesnt anyone else find this a bit worrying? it seems all DARPA and the likes want to create is super weapons and surveillance gadgets, somehow i feel these will ultimatly be used against civillians more than in a battlefield :(...."


Well, I've got nothing to hide.

Here's my typical day....
Wake up. Take a piss. Make coffee. Drink the coffee. Watch some tube. Surf the web (Engadget, CNET, NYTIMES, CNN..etc). Find some porn. Grab a bite. Go to work. Sit at my monitor all friggen day. Surf the web some more. Send a few viral funny videos to my mates. Grab some lunch (maybe Mexican, today?). Video conference with London. Call my girlfriend...she's coming over tonight. Finish that report that should've been done last week. Log off. Go home. Clean up the apartment...realize I forgot to buy some condoms (must remember extra LARGE!). Take a shower. Put on some clean clothes. Girlfriend shows up. Have sex for fifteen minutes. Put on some crappy chick-flick DVD. Push her out the door. Go to bed. Set alarm for 5:30- a.m.

Yup...all the while hundreds of little maple-seed UAVs are flittering about collecting intel on my rather boring, mundane existence and feeding that info back to some poor, pale sap at the NSA who hasn't seen the light of day in 2 weeks.

Not to worried on my end.

[bartsimpson @ Jul 22nd 2006 5:09PM]

Anyone read 'Pray'.........

[Michael @ Jul 22nd 2006 5:23PM]

Super surveillance....Just what we stupid humans need. Wow, we could hook it up to CNN and sit and watch the poorer nations starve and kill each other from the comfort of our sitting rooms. Now THATS what I call progress....NOT!

[Taylor Alexander @ Jul 22nd 2006 5:36PM]

Launched from a hovercraft? Where did that come from? Do we even use hovercrafts that often? I feel like these things would need to be launched from air-based vehicles... in case we forgot, hovercrafts are ground-based vehicles, making them no more worth mentioning than jeeps in this situation... Were they just mentioned to make it sound cooler...?
-Taylor

[John @ Jul 22nd 2006 7:31PM]

That looks like a brittled nutsack that dried out in the Sahara.

[Jason @ Jul 22nd 2006 8:39PM]

bartsimpson

I'm assuming you mean prEy, the Michael Crichton book, which was excellent. Unless you mean "Pray" the book Zorak is writing about proper methods of worship of our new robomaple overlords (mostly lots of syrup rituals as I understand it).

Prey, like most Crichton novels, seems very thoroughly researched and is definitely filled with warnings that one hopes the developers of nanotechnology are paying attention to.

I'm gonna disagree with grable, though. I don't think this is some sort of NSA plot. Come on, people, they're MAPLE leaves. Clearly this is some sort of nefarious advance guard for a Canadian invasion of the US homeland!

Blame Canada!!

--Jason

[dc @ Jul 23rd 2006 12:16AM]

Nigel,

Only 15 minutes?

[hydrogen_wv @ Jul 23rd 2006 10:26AM]

And notice that they don't watch the DVD... He just turns it on and shoves her out the door... Apparently, he likes a good chick-flick after his "15 minutes of fame".

Sorry to poke fun, but you opened up for it... He does have a good point though. Most of us do the same thing every single day... Sure it might be more interesting than a soap opera, but not by too much.

*Blink* I figured it out! The government and the porn industry are working together! They are dropping maple seeds into windows to record sex... Then they start 5 million websites with the pictures, make us pay $5 a month for privilages to watch it... I figure one of these is cheaper than paying ron jeremy and jenna jameson thousands of dollars each to bone.

[Jacob @ Jul 23rd 2006 12:20PM]

So what's it gonna do?

Twirl around a whole lot until it hits the ground and gets eaten by squirrels?

[TheBlunderbuss @ Jul 23rd 2006 10:55PM]

Whirlygigs!

[Scott @ Jul 24th 2006 10:10AM]

"Well, I've got nothing to hide."

Worst. Argument. Ever. Anyone can be made to look like they're doing something wrong if you gather enough ancedotal evidence and leave out everything else.

[iamanut @ Jul 25th 2006 11:34AM]

I don't understand why they specify the implementation. Why must it be shaped like a maple seed? Shouldn't they be letting Lockheed determine the best shape to achieve the functionality they are looking for? What if they determine that it should have 3 fins instead of 1?

[Kevin @ Jul 25th 2006 2:54PM]

Damn, Nigel - you gotta get a life.... or find a bridge... 15 minutes???

B^(

[Bryan @ Jul 25th 2006 4:41PM]

The Los Angeles Sheriffs Department has their own UAVs for surveillance and patrol, theyre just waiting on FAA approval to fly them.

[Nancy @ Jul 27th 2006 8:29PM]

AAOPA we have a problem!!LOL!!!