Officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are looking for help in creating a new type of drone that is capable of vanishing after being exposed to sunlight.
According to IGN and the Daily Mail, the goal of the project, dubbed the Inbound Controlled Air-Releasable Unrecoverable Systems or ICARUS project, is to create drones that could take medical supplies and other gear to people in war zones without the risk of being intercepted.
These single-use, so-called “vampire” drones would disappear completely within four hours of delivering their payload or within 30 minutes of morning twilight, depending upon which is earlier. Not only would this keep supplies and technology out of enemy hands, but it would eliminate the risk of giving away the recipient’s location as well.
Sources indicate that DARPA envisions several different scenarios in which such a device would be useful. For instance, the UAV could be used by troops to send food and medicine to remote or hard-to-reach areas affected by disasters without needing to worry about recovering the vehicles. The drones could also secretly send supplies to soldiers before seemingly disappearing into thin air.
ICARUS program builds on previous disappearing resources research
In a statement, DARPA officials said that the new ICARUS program would build upon the work of its Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) initiative, which started in 2013 and resulted in the development of self-destructing electronic components. The military research group hopes that this technology can be adapted to the proposed disappearing aerial delivery vehicles.
Troy Olsson, the VAPR and ICARUS program manager, explained that the VAPR program has been working on developing “a lot of structurally sound transient materials whose mechanical properties have exceeded our expectations,” including small polymer panels that can sublimate directly from a solid phase to a gas phase and self-destructing electronics-bearing glass strips.
When brainstorming potential used for the technology developed by the VAPR team, he and his colleagues came up with the idea for a UAV that could disappear immediately following use. In order to make these drones a reality, DARPA is seeking proposals from those interested in taking part in the two-phase ICARUS program–a 26 month program with an $8 million budget.
“Vanishing delivery vehicles could extend military and civilian operational capabilities in extenuating circumstances where currently there is no means to provide additional support, explained Olsson.
“Inventing transient materials, devising ways of scaling up their production, and combining those challenges with the hard control and aerodynamic requirements to reach the precision and soft-landing specs we need here makes for a challenging and compelling engineering problem.”
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Feature Image: Defense Images/Flickr
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