Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have an important role to play in modern military operations. The UAVs of the future are expected to have advanced takeoff and landing abilities, should be easily adaptable to mission requirements in various conditions and show improved endurance and need few support equipment.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic (SSC Atlantic) have announced a contest inviting engineers, scientists and dreamers to come up with innovative designs for building UAVs. This contest has been named, UAVForge Challenge and the prize money that the contenders will win is $ 100,000 USD. The contenders are required to build and subsequently test a back-pack portable UAV that will fly in and out of crucial environments without generating noise and survey the area for three hours.
Jim McCormick, the program manager at DARPA, gave further details of the contest thus; the challenge aims at identifying mature and system incorporating methods for building UAVs. The teams that are self-selected will take part in a peer reviewed milestones where the participants will rate the top ten teams, which will participate in the UAVForge Fly-Off Competition. As part of the testing process, the performance of the vehicles would be tested in a replicated high-stress observation mission. McCormick was eager to see the design entries that would be submitted for the challenge. He added that along with the prize money the winner would be offered an opportunity to work with a UAV manufacturer selected by the Government to manufacture the system that was designed by him.