High-​​Flying, Secret Drone Unveiled

With a 90-​​foot wingspan and a tail­less design, the “Polecat” UAV looks like a smaller ver­sion of the B-​​2 stealth bomber. And like the B-​​2, the drone has been built to be stealthy and sneaky. But the twin-​​engine Polecat is “90 per­cent com­pos­ite mate­ri­als, rather than metal,” the L.A. Daily News notes. “The vehi­cle is also made from less than 200 parts,” adds Aviation Week. “Adhesives are used rather than riv­ets, decreas­ing the amount of labor needed to con­struct it — that approach also con­tributed to a lower radar cross sec­tion inher­ent in the design.“
The Polecat has taken two sub­sonic flights, around 15,000 ft. But, even­tu­ally, the idea is to fly it 60,000 and higher — and break the sound bar­rier. Up there, con­trails don’t form, Jane’s observes, so the plane can stay hid­den even bet­ter. Plus, Lockheed wants to see how its com­pos­ites hold up at high alti­tudes.
Skunk Works is also try­ing to rig Polecat up with “a fully autonomous flight con­trol and mission-​​handling sys­tem that will allow future UAVs to con­duct their mis­sions, from take-​​off to land­ing, with­out the inter­ven­tion of human oper­a­tors,” Jane’s adds.
Already hard at work on a num­ber of shape-​​shifting planes, Lockheed is work­ing on ways for the Polecat and future UAVs to alter their struc­ture — and change their roles mid-​​mission, Jane’s con­tin­ues. An “extended-​​wing long-​​loitering [recon] plan­form” could sud­denly change into “a swept-​​wing attack configuration.”

The addi­tion of a tail, for exam­ple, that could morph from a hor­i­zon­tal into a ver­ti­cal con­fig­u­ra­tion — to allow a laminar-​​flow wing to fly and manoeu­vre with­out undue risk in the thin air above 60,000 ft. A mor­ph­ing tail might also be a desir­able fea­ture for a carrier-​​borne UAV. 

The com­pany built the plane with $27 mil­lion of its own money over an 18-​​month period. But with the Air Force already pour­ing money in to high-​​altitude drone devel­op­ment — and look­ing to put a new, multi-​​billion dol­lar fleet of long-​​range bombers in the air by 2018, that could be money extremely well spent.
UPDATE 2:49 PM: Lockheed is doing more than build­ing giant drones. The com­pany is mak­ing itty-​​bitty, teeny-​​weeny UAVs, too. Darpa just gave Lockheed a $1.7 mil­lion, 10-​​month con­tract to build a drone “sim­i­lar in size and shape to a maple tree seed.”

A chem­i­cal rocket enclosed in its one-​​bladed wing will power a sen­sor pay­load mod­ule more than 1,100 yards. Delivered from a hover and weigh­ing up to 0.07 ounces, the mod­ule will be inter­change­able based on mis­sion require­ments. Besides con­trol­ling lift and pitch, the wing will also house teleme­try, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, nav­i­ga­tion, imag­ing sen­sors, and bat­tery power. The NAV [nano air vehi­cle] will be about 1.5 inches long and have a max­i­mum take­off weight of about 0.35 ounces.
In typ­i­cal oper­a­tion, a warfighter will launch the NAV and fly it toward the tar­get by view­ing its flight path through a cam­era embed­ded in the wing. Like a maple tree seed, the one-​​bladed device will rotate in flight, but its cam­era will pro­vide a sta­ble for­ward view and trans­mit images back to a small, hand-​​held dis­play. As the sys­tem matures, a sim­ple autopi­lot aboard the NAV will pro­vide lim­ited autonomous oper­a­tions. Once the NAV deliv­ers its pay­load, it will return to the warfighter for col­lec­tion and refurbishment.

UPDATE 07/​24/​06 4:06 PM: It turns out this secret UAV wasn’t built, — it was printed, New Scientist notes.

In rapid pro­to­typ­ing, a three-​​dimensional design for a part — a wing strut, say — is fed from a computer-​​aided design (CAD) sys­tem to a microwave-​​oven-​​sized cham­ber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the cham­ber, a com­puter steers two finely focussed, pow­er­ful laser beams at a poly­mer or metal pow­der, sin­ter­ing it and fus­ing it layer by layer to form com­plex, solid 3D shapes.
The tech­nique is widely used in indus­try to make pro­to­type parts — to see if, for instance, they are the right shape and thick­ness for the job in hand. Now the strength of parts printed this way has improved so much that they can be used as work­ing com­po­nents.
About 90 per cent of Polecat is made of com­pos­ite mate­ri­als with much of that mate­r­ial made by rapid prototyping. 

(Big ups: Eric)

July 21st, 2006 | Drones | 2034273 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/07/21/high-flying-secret-drone-unveiled/High-Flying%2C+Secret+Drone+Unveiled2006-07-21+16%3A00%3A13david_axe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.