AST Digital Magazine July 2017 Digital-July | Page 37

Volume 14
July 2017 Edition
watch the video below:
Courtesy of DARPA
During each day’s morning and afternoon obsta-
cle-course runs, at least one team was able to fly
the mission autonomously, including a return to
the starting point or a location close to the start—
to the applause of all researchers and the test
evaluators sitting under their canopies.
Success was largely a matter of supe-
rior programming.
“FLA is not aimed at developing new sensor
technology or to solve the autonomous naviga-
tion and obstacle avoidance challenges by add-
ing more and more computing power,” Ledé said.
(Courtesy of DARPA and YouTube)
“I was impressed with the capabilities the teams
achieved in Phase 1,” Ledé said.
“We’re looking forward to Phase 2 to further
refine and build on the valuable lessons we’ve
learned.
We’ve still got quite a bit of work to do to enable
full autonomy for the wide-ranging scenarios we
tested, but I think the algorithms we’re devel-
oping could soon be used to augment existing
GPS-dependent UAVs for some applications.
“The key elements in this effort, which make it
challenging, are the requirements to use inex-
pensive inertial measurement units and off-the-
shelf quadcopters with limited weight capacity.”
“This puts the program emphasis on creating
novel algorithms that work at high speed in real
time with relatively low-power, small single board
computers similar to a smart phone.”
Each team brought unique technologies and ap-
proaches for outfitting their UAVs.
To hear a little about their approaches
For example, existing UAVs could use GPS until
the air vehicle enters a building, and then FLA
algorithms would take over while indoors, while
ensuring collision-free flight throughout.
I think that kind of synergy between GPS-reliant
systems and our new FLA capabilities could be
very powerful in the relatively near future.”
To learn more, visit www.darpa.mil.
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