Lockheed Martin

Inspired by the winding flight of a falling maple seed, Lockheed Martin's latest unmanned aerial vehicle concept, the Samarai Monocopter, doesn't look intimidating. But Lockheed thinks it could become a powerful tool for soldiers in the field, a tiny flying machine they could take along with them.

The Samarai prototype is just 10 inches long, and Lockheed hopes to get it down to the size of a fingernail. The company revealed it to the world on Tuesday at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's Unmanned Systems Symposium in Washington, D.C. At just half a pound, it can take off vertically from a standstill, or take flight after someone tosses it into the air. Like a maple seed, the Samarai's shape causes it to automatically rotate as it moves through the air, and that, along with its light weight, keeps it easily aloft.

"We identified the maple seed as a very simple example of how evolution has refined the design over millions of years," says Bill Borgia, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Lockheed Martin. "By applying some very simple concepts of power and a control surface to it, we were able to harness that and turn it into a working system."

Surveillance could be one key use for the Samarai, Borgia says—imagine soldiers launching the device from nearly anywhere and seeing the video that mounted cameras stream back in real time.

"You can think of a situation where a solider would carry this around in a backpack in an urban environment where he needs to look inside a window or somewhere he can't see," Borgia says. "He can deploy this very quickly. It can operate in a confined space because it's capable of vertical flight, so it can navigate to where the soldier wants to look and give him a birds-eye view of what he can't see directly."

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Lockheed communications manager Stephen O'Neill says the trials on Tuesday went off without a hitch, with the pint-size UAV staying aloft for a few minutes on each flight. Still, the Samarai remains a proof-of-concept project. And it's quite difficult to fly, given that the seed-inspired design includes just one rotor. "If you think for a minute about a helicopter, it has a two-rotor system, and if one of those blades fell off, what would happen to that helicopter?" O'Neill says. "Essentially we have the same device but with one airfoil, and it's under complete control."

Though a single-blade approach presents a huge challenge, Borgia says this can be a good thing. "That challenge gives us tremendous knowledge about control systems in general," he says. "Then we can take the knowledge and that technology and apply it to other applications in robotics."

What those specific applications are, however, Borgia cannot say. "Once we get robots into the hands of users, they'll think of far more applications than we as engineers have ever been able to."

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