AST Digital Magazine July 2017 Digital-July | Page 36

Volume 14
The first successful foray from sunlight through a
doorway and into darkness brought a cheer.
“It’s in the hangar!” came a gleeful cry over the
walkie-talkies.
And when a UAV maneuvered successfully
around the interior obstacles and reached the
targeted red chemical barrel, an official goal ob-
server took to the microphone intoning: “Goal,
Goal, Goal!”, indicating the UAV had reached the
objective as verified by all three “goal cameras”
pointed at the barrel.
July 2017 Edition
the UAV so it wouldn’t be damaged, using the
emergency RF link that had been installed for
these experiments in the event a vehicle headed
out of bounds or began flying erratically at high
speed toward an object—which happened on
several occasions.
Courtesy of DARPA
Courtesy of DARPA
The final stretch involved the UAV flying back to
the starting point and landing.
To be sure, there were sighs of de-
spair as well.
Undaunted by such glitches, teams would return
to their tents, make some tweaks to the algo-
rithms on laptops, upload them to the bird, and
then launch again for another try.
And no, not every landing was soft.
A few times the quadcopter was flying so fast,
the safety pilot didn’t have time to make the split-
second decision to take over.
Sometimes a quadcopter would reach a point
along the course and, inexplicably, hover as if
dazed or confused about what to do next. More than once that resulted in a wince-evoking
“crunch”—the hallmark acoustical signature of a
UAV smacking squarely into a tree or side of the
hangar.
After a pause, it would fly back to the starting
point, having been programmed to do so if it
didn’t know what to do next. Back to the team’s shade tent for some adjust-
ments to the algorithm before uploading to a re-
placement craft.
“I think it’s basically completely lost,” one re-
searcher lamented after his team’s vehicle got
close to the target in a clearing in the woods, but
then took a wrong turn into another clea ring and
just kept going further away from the barrel. Each team had several UAVs on standby in their
tents, and like pit crews at a raceway would
quickly replace the broken bird with a fresh one
to get in as many attempts as possible during
their allotted 20-minute slot for each task.
In that case, a safety pilot took over and landed 36