Lockheed Martin Corp. engineers have unveiled a tiny aerial drone that spins like a falling maple seed.
The New Jersey-based developers say the autonomous, single-wing aircraft, called the Samurai, is envisioned as a family of palm-sized unmanned aerial vehicles that can hover, as well as take off and land vertically.
The team’s Samurai demonstrator weighs 600 grams and is about 100 centimeters long. At one end of the wing is a disc containing the vehicle’s avionics and electronics, including software that controls the aircraft’s flight via a flap on the wing.
“It’s the first single-wing UAV to demonstrate full autonomous flight,” says Kingsley Fregene, principal investigator on the project.
The prototype spins around a wooden peg on the ground that launches it into the air. It flies to pre-programmed waypoints and then lands on the ground. Powered by an electric motor, the aircraft rotates 300 times per minute and can carry a payload of 300 grams.
“When it’s spinning, it’s stable in the air, unlike a conventional helicopter, which is inherently unstable when it’s hovering,” Fregene says.
An on-board camera captures video. Engineers are developing software that synchronizes the images four times per rotation to give operators a stable view from the aircraft.
The team has scaled down the vehicle to a bat-sized prototype that can be tossed like a boomerang into flight. Its propulsion system will support an electric motor as well as a micro-pulsejet engine, Fregene says. His team will integrate the non-electric propulsion system into the prototype with a goal of flying it by late summer. The idea is to miniaturize the components into a 10-centimeter version of the aircraft, which has been modeled and flown in simulations. The concept was originally funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency nano air vehicle program.