Nano Air Vehicle
 Growing up in the Midwest, a Young Ned Allen for Years Watched the Seeds of Silver Maple Trees Spiral Elegantly and Effortlessly to the Ground
These were not simply a sign of changing seasons for this boy, they were amazing machines, tremendously efficient whirling aircraft designed and perfected by nature over millions of years to travel the greatest possible distance from their source.
Decades later those elegant natural fliers still inspire the Skunk Works’™ Chief Scientist, Dr. Ned Allen.
What the boy marveled at and what today’s mathematician is today trying to leverage under a Lockheed Martin-led project with DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, is a revolutionary design for a remote-controlled Nano Air Vehicle –– a “NAV” –– that holds the potential to fundamentally change the way the military and other users perform a host of critical missions.
So Far, So Good.
A team led by the company’s Advanced Technology Laboratories and consisting of its Skunk Works’ Advanced Development Programs, the Lockheed Martin-managed Sandia National Laboratories, and partners AeroCraft Consulting, ATK GASL, and the University of Pennsylvania, is working on the first phase of the NAV program; this will culminate in a preliminary design review and go/no-go tests around the end of the year.
Following this, according to Steve Jameson, manager of ATL’s Intelligent Autonomy Programs, DARPA may fund an additional 18-month effort during which Lockheed Martin will design and test a flying prototype.
Nano-Sized, Mega-Capable
DARPA’s objective in the NAV program is to prove the principle of having a very small remote-controlled air vehicle collect and transmit real-time military intelligence indoors and outdoors on the urban battlefield.
In a typical operation, a warfighter carrying a handful of the diminutive NAVs in his pocket will launch and fly one toward the target by viewing its flight path through a camera embedded in the wing. Like the maple tree seed that it resembles, the one-bladed device will rotate in flight, but its camera will provide a stable forward view and transmit real-time images back to a small, hand-held display. According to Dr. Allen, Lockheed Martin’s NAV can fly at speeds up to 10 meters per second and have a flight path of about 1,000 meters. As the system matures, a simple autopilot aboard the NAV will provide limited autonomous operations. Once the nano vehicle completes its mission, it can return to the warfighter to be refurbished. Dr. Allen noted that in addition to being ground launched, NAVs could readily be deployed by airdrop or from a grenade launcher with the vehicles and their payloads actuated by pressure change.
While the other NAV program competitors are pursuing flapping wing and rotorcraft-type NAV designs, Lockheed Martin’s entry borrows its mono-copter design from the maple seed... with some novel 21st century adaptations definitely never devised by Mother Nature.
Incredibly, system propulsion (for lift and direction) is courtesy of a tiny, solid two-stage rocket thruster embedded on the blade’s tip, giving the nano vehicle extra range and endurance. While stability and guidance are controlled on-board the air vehicle, top level navigation and other commands are controlled off-board.
Besides controlling lift and pitch, the single winged NAV will also house telemetry, communications, navigation, imaging sensors and the power source. The nano vehicle is designed to carry a payload module –– close to the size of a 2 gram aspirin tablet — which will be interchangeable based on mission requirements, such as chemical and biological detection, infrared surveillance and other purposes.
 Transitioning Technology To the Warfighter
When contemplating the nano vehicle, one can’t help but marvel at its tiny scale and at the associated challenges of subsystem development and integration.
While Jameson and Allen note that meeting the performance requirements identified within the stringent volume and mass constraints prescribed by DARPA is indeed a daunting engineering challenge, they caution that to focus on the individual vehicle is to miss the larger point of the NAV system development, at least as far as Lockheed Martin is concerned.
Dr. Allen notes that simply validating the nano systems technology, while certainly challenging and compelling, is not what DARPA and the services ultimately want, and is not why the Corporation is involved. At the core of the effort is building a promising technology validation. Says Jameson: “As a warfighter focused company we reflexively ask the ‘so what?’ question of ourselves. From the outset we thought about where this technology could take us, how it could apply to a warfighting need and, if possible, change the way forces operate. Our forte, after all, is our depth and experience in providing capabilities for long-term transition to operational use.”
While the DARPA activity focuses on validating the technical concept of individual air vehicles, Lockheed Martin believes the capabilities of the NAV will lead to application of large insect-like swarms of highly robust air vehicles capable of autonomous, massively parallel battlefield effects.
Such NAV swarms, Dr. Allen notes, have the potential to “find needles in haystacks.” Assuming the integration of various alternate payloads, such a capability could have broad application to urban warfare, homeland security, police work, or even commercial activities.
As to whether the operational requirements for NAVs exist at the moment, Jameson concedes that part of the task for technology innovators is to define the realm of the possible once mission enablers like the nano vehicle are proven feasible and brought to maturity. Here again, he observes, is an area of Lockheed Martin strength.
Says Jameson: “We have to get the NAV and our notions of NAV architectures to a place in terms of mission-ready capability and unit cost where it makes real sense to leverage it and then allow users to see the ‘big picture’ potential.”
Dr. Allen echoes the sentiment that there is lots of work to be done. Realizing these sorts of applications will require dramatically reducing not only system risk, but also the unit cost from tens of thousands of dollars per air vehicle to the range of $10 to $20 each.
See Insights Magazine more information on this story and other examples of Lockheed Martin innovations.
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