Lockheed Martin SAMARAI UAV Scares Me

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 28 of September , 2009 at 12:54 am

This is SAMARAI, a UAV that Lockheed Martin has been working on based on a monocopter platfor. A monocopter is like a helicopter, except that the entire vehicle consists of a single rotating airfoil, making them somewhat impractical for manned flight. And, from the looks of things, more than a little dangerous, although the project was named SAMARAI not after its efficiency at decapitations but after samara, which are those monocopter seed pod things that fly down off of trees.

Eventually, the SAMARAI project was supposed to produce a nanomonocopter (?) about the same size as a seed pod (on the order of 1.5 inches long and 10 grams in weight), driven by a miniature rocket or jet thruster, able to send back streaming video (that was stabilized somehow), autonavigate, and deliver a 2 gram payload up to a kilometer away. The big version in the video above was a testbed to help engineers figure out just how to get this thing to fly in a stable and controllable manner.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with this particular project… According to Danger Room, the SAMARAI project was canceled last year after completing phase 1 of a DARPA nano air vehicle contract. Phase 2 of that contract, incidentally, went to AeroVironment for this. The information included with the above video, however, suggests that this flight test is “recent,” and while no sources are cited, the YouTube channel it’s from is run by an editor over at Aviation Week (or so it says), so there’s some amount of credibility there. Maybe we’ll get some answers in the near future now that this video is live.

After the jump, an unrelated but extremely scary video of an uncontrolled monocopter powered by 3 model rocket engines firing in sequence

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[ 2008 Danger Room Article ]
[ 2006 SpaceRef Article ]

Comments (3)

Category: Biorobotics, Military, Research

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3 Comments

Comment by Joey1058

Made Wednesday, 30 of September , 2009 at 11:02 am

This seems to be one of those “we have money lying around, so lets throw it at a project no matter how dumb” ideas. DARPA needs to realize that not every stupid idea they come up with will work. They’re called monocopters for a reason. They are already starting from an established height off the ground. And they just float along on the wind. They need to stick with that concept, and abandon the crazy notion of launching from the ground. Take however many thousands up in a drone, open the tiny little bay doors, and drop ‘em like bombs. They will be in the air quite long enough to broadcast whatever silly bits of people in their underwear are doing. Colored the same as the maple seeds they’re modeled after, they will be ignored and quietly dissolve into the ground, except they won’t grow spy camera trees.

Comment by Alan Parekh

Made Thursday, 1 of October , 2009 at 5:01 am

That second video is scary! I can just imagine that thing buzzing through dozens of spectators before crashing to the ground.

Comment by Xt@z

Made Thursday, 29 of October , 2009 at 2:35 am

Wow ! It doesn’t look that controlled… o_O It looks more like an insane boomerang than a controled vehicule… lol