DARPA & The Impossible Frontier
DARPA’s heavy-lift drone competition, explosive vegetable peeling, multi-modal sensing, and more.
Topics worth your time: the fascinating aircraft competing in DARPA’s heavy-lift drone challenge, an explosive approach to peeling vegetables, and Waymo’s case for multi-modal sensing in autonomous vehicles.
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Interesting Design Competition: The DARPA Lift Challenge
One of the familiar critiques of institutional bodies is that they are bureaucratic, burdened by red tape, and slow to innovate. All of that can be true, and more. Yet there’s an interesting dichotomy where some of the most consequential technical leaps of the last century emerged from institutions like DARPA, which paved an early path for self-driving cars with the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and funded ARPANET, the internet’s direct ancestor.
Perhaps the better answer to the contradiction is that the institution doesn’t need to innovate itself. It just needs to create the conditions for everyone else to do so. Define an almost unreasonable goal, then distribute the R&D across everyone willing to try.
The modern reincarnation is the DARPA Lift Challenge - a competition to build a sub-55-pound drone that can take off vertically and carry a payload of at least 110 pounds over 5 nautical miles. $6.5M in total prize money, including $2.5M for first place.
It sounds relatively straightforward until you consider that the primary metric is payload-to-aircraft weight ratio, not payload itself. DARPA set the target at 4:1, meaning a 55-pound aircraft would need to carry 220 pounds! For reference, the best aircraft on the market are agricultural drones like the DJI Agras T50, which has a ratio of ~0.75:1 and weighs 115 pounds with an 85-pound payload. DARPA requires 2:1 just to qualify.
The competition is running right now (Aug. 6–9), and the entrants are fascinating to watch in real time.
RotoWings: two RC planes tethered together to create a giant virtual rotor.
Phoenix Drone LLC: a tandem-rotor design.
Avidrone, currently in first place: a conventional single-rotor helicopter.
If you’re interested in following the competition, check out DARPA TV or Hunter Weiss’s feed. And for aerodynamic theory, Principles of Helicopter Aerodynamics is the classic reference.
This Youtuber also has a great set of videos documenting his build for the challenge and the broader competition landscape.
More From Around The Web
On the topic of autonomous vehicles, Waymo’s defense of a multi-modal sensor architecture. Before becoming the company we know today, Waymo grew out of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon’s public proof at the original DARPA Grand Challenge.
Structural components in a KitchenAid mixer.
Patrick Collison on going fast - a catalog of ambitious projects completed on short timelines.
Testing Claude Fable 5 on recreating an adjustable wrench from a picture.
And a funny meme about changing times.
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Interesting Video: Explosive Fruit Peeling
StuffMadeHere’s latest contraption for automated vegetable and fruit peeling, derived from R.H. Winter’s original design in 1945 (US Patent 2490112).
Manufacturing & Startup News
Senra Systems raised $65M in Series B funding to expand its wire-harness manufacturing capacity, including a planned third factory and a goal of growing from ~1k to 10k harnesses per month next year.
Avatar Robotics raised $6.5M in seed funding to deploy teleoperated warehouse robots and use the resulting data to train more autonomous systems.
Mousterian and Samsung Heavy Industries signed an engineering contract for a 50 MW floating data center in Texas.
NavVis raised $85M in new funding to expand the mobile-scanning hardware and software it uses to build digital twins of industrial facilities.
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I remember seeing the call for DARPA lift. Are baloons not allowed?