Posted on 03/06/2007 2:22:05 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
At the far lower end of the fast-growing UAV field, Nano and Micro Air Vehicles will give the warfighter new surveillance capability
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that can be contained in a backpack or even in the palm of your hand promise to deliver new intelligence-gathering and surveillance capabilities from the platoon level down to the individual soldier. These miniature aircraft gradually are taking their place at the far lower end of the rapidly growing UAV field.
With a research and engineering backdrop of more than a decade by various organizations, micro air vehicles (MAV) like the AeroVironment Wasp and Honeywell MAV are being evaluated in the field by U.S. military services. Further down the road in development, and orders of magnitude smaller, nano air vehicles (NAV) are at the conceptual design stage, facing unprecedented challenges in aerodynamics, propulsion and systems integration.
"The functionality of the micro air vehicle at the 100-to-150-gram scale has improved enormously," said Darryll Pines, chairman of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland in College Park, Md. Work on NAVs, he said, has "pushed into even more fundamental physics problems associated with bio-inspired flight, where insects and small birds live."
Pines said a workshop conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and contractor Rand Corp. led to the beginning of a MAV program in 1994. The notional dimensions of such an aircraft, with a 6-inch wingspan and gross takeoff weight of 100 grams (3.5 ounces), were possible because of advances in microelectronics that made it feasible to build something at this scale.
The first years of the effort produced some interesting configurations, he said, but not the performance numbers developers hoped to achieve. This spurred a "huge interest" in academia in the mid-to-late 1990s to crack the physics problems associated with a miniature air vehicle. Foremost was managing airflow at low Reynolds number — the ratio of inertial to viscous forces in the air, taking into account the speed and length of the vehicle.
More at source.
cool. bump for later & for aeronaut's ping list.
That is cool! Thanks.
I just got my Air Hog™ today !!!!!!!
I think this is scary....what if "Big Brother" got ahold of these?
;0)
"I think this is scary....what if "Big Brother" got ahold of these?"
Buy a fly swatter!
How long can those things fly until the batteries run out?
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