Multirotor drones excel at vertical lift and hover, while fixed wing drones are great at both distance and wide-open spaces. In February, Auterion Government Solutions and Quantum-Systems announced a two-pronged approach to the rotor- or fixed-wing drone market, with a pair of drones that use the same sensor packages and fuselage to operate as either the Scorpion Trirotor or the Vector fixed wing craft.

“As we started to develop our tactical UAS Platform, our plan was only to develop a VTOL fixed wing solution (like our Vector),” said Florian Siebel, managing director of Quantum-Systems. “During the development process we decided to build a Tri-Copter Platform as well, as a result of many discussions with law enforcement agencies and Search and Rescue Units.”

Adapting the fixed-wing fuselage to the tri-copter attachments means the drone can now operate in narrow spaces and harsh conditions. Scorpion, with the rotors, can fly for about 45 minutes, with a cruising speed of zero to 33 mph. Put the fixed wings back on for Vector, and the flight time is now two hours, with a cruising speed of 33 to 44 mph.

The parts snap into place without any need for special tooling, and Auterion recommends the drone for missions in rain or snow. Both platforms share a gimbal EO/IR with 10x optical zoom, 720p EO video, 480p IR video, laser illuminator, IR laser ranger. Common between modes is also a tactical mapping tool using a 21 megapixel Sony UMC R10C camera. For the scorpion, there’s also the option of a gimbaled electro-optical camera with a 30x optical zoom.

Both drones are designed to fit in rucksacks that a person can carry one at a time. While many features are common across Vector and Scorpion, the plan is not to include both rotors or wings in the same kit. Once a team packs into the field with a drone on its back, that’s the mode the drone can be used in.

Auterion intends to ship the drones by the fourth quarter of 2020, with preorders available.

Designing a drone body is about settling on the right compromise. Vector and Scorpion are built on top of open source code. This includes an operating system capable of programmable autopilot , as well as machine-vision collision prevention and obstacle detection and avoidance. Software for the ground station and cloud data management of the drone are also built on open source code. The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit awarded Auterion a $2 million contract last year to work on the PX4 software to help drive compatibility standards in the drone industry.

As militaries across the world look to the enterprise sector for capable drones at smaller profile than existing military models, transparency in code and flexibility in airframe could become more widely adopted trends. In the meantime, there is Vector, and there is Scorpion.

Outside the compound on Oct. 26, waiting and at the ready, was a robot.

The vested man was later identified as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant.

“We had a robot just in case because we were afraid he had a suicide vest and if you get close to him and he blows it up, you’re going to die. You’re going to die. He had a very powerful suicide vest,” President Donald Trump said in a press conference about the raid in the following days.

“The robot was set, too, but we didn’t hook it up because we were too — they were moving too fast. We were moving fast,” the president continued. “We weren’t 100 percent sure about the tunnel being dead ended. It’s possible that there could have been an escape hatch somewhere along that we didn’t know about.”

In this case, the robot never went in the tunnels.

Picture the scene, four months later, in the damp subterranean levels of the never-finished Satsop nuclear power plant outside Elma, Washington. There, engineers and scientists are testing the machines and algorithms that may guide missions for a time, preparing for a time when the robots won’t remain on the sidelines.

None of the robots fielded at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Subterranean Challenge urban circuit in Elma in February are particularly battle-ready, though a few could likely work in a pinch.

Apart from a single human commander able to take remote control, the robots navigate, mostly autonomously. As captured on hours of video, the robots crawled, floated, rolled and stumbled their way through the course. They mapped their environment and searched for up to 20 special artifacts in the special urban circuit courses, built in the underground levels around a never-used cooling tower.

The artifacts included cellphones emitting bluetooth, Wi-Fi and occasionally video. They included red backpacks and thermal manikins warmed to the temperature of humans playing an audio recording, and they included carbon dioxide gas and warm blowing vents.

This urban circuit is the second of three underground environments that DARPA is using to test robots. Phones, manikins and backpacks are common across the tunnel, urban and cave settings that constitute the full range of subterranean challenges. The straightforward mission of the contest is to create machines that are better at rescue in environments that are dangerous and difficult for first responders, who are humans. If robots can find people trapped underground, then humans can use their energy getting to those same people, rather than expend that energy searching themselves.

A subtext of the Subterranean Challenge is that the same technologies that lead robots to rescue people underground could also lead infantry to find enemies hiding in tunnel complexes. While Delta Force was able to corner al-Baghdadi in Syria, much of the military’s modern interest in tunnel warfare can be traced back to Osama bin Laden evading capture for years by escaping through the tunnels at Tora Bora.

Underground at Satsop, the future of warfare was far less a concern than simply making sure the robots could navigate the courses before them. That meant, most importantly, maintaining contact with the other robots on the team, and with a human supervisor.

Thick concrete walls, feet of dirt, heavy cave walls and the metals embedded in the structure all make underground sites that the military describes as passively denied environments, where the greatest obstacle to communication through the electromagnetic spectrum is the terrain itself. It’s a problem military leaders, particularly in the Army, are hoping to solve for future iterations of their networks.

Team NUS SEDS, the undergrad roboticists representing the National University of Singapore Students for Exploration and Development of Space, arrived in Washington with one of the smallest budgets of any competitor, spending roughly $12,000 on everything from robot parts to travel and lodging. One of their robots, a larger tracked vehicle, was held up by U.S. Customs, and unable to take part in the competition.

Not to be deterred, at the team’s preparation area, members showed off a version of the most striking design innovation at the competition: droppable Wi-Fi repeaters. As designed, the robots would release a repeater the moment they lost contact with the human operator. To lighten the data load, the onboard computers would compress the data to one-hundredth of its size, and then send it through the repeater.

“It’s like dropping bread crumbs,” said Ramu Vairavan, the team’s president.

Unfortunately for NUS SEDS, the bread crumbs were not enough, and the team only found one artifact in its four runs between the two courses. But the bread-crumb concept was shared across various teams.

Besides the physical competition taking place underground at Satsop, the urban circuit held a parallel virtual challenge, where teams selected robots and sensors from a defined budget and then programmed algorithms to tackle a challenge fully autonomously. The repeaters, such a popular innovation in the physical space, will likely be programmed into the next round of the virtual challenge.

The first DARPA Grand Challenge, launched in 2004, focused on getting roboticists together to provide a technological answer to a military problem. Convoys, needed for sustaining logistics in occupied countries, are vulnerable to attack, and tasking humans to drive the vehicles and escort the cargo only increasing the fixed costs of resupply. What if, instead, the robots could drive themselves over long stretches of desert?

After much attention and even more design, the March 2004 challenge ended with no vehicle having gone even a tenth the distance of the 142-mile track. A second Grand Challenge, held 18 months later, delivered far more successful results, and is largely credited with sparking the modern wave of autonomous driving features in cars.

Open desert is a permissive space, and navigation across it is aided by existing maps and the ever-present GPS data. This is the same architecture that undergirds much of autonomous navigation today, where surface robots and flying drones can all plug into communication networks offering useful location data.

Underground offers a fundamentally unknowable environment. Robots can explore parts of it, but even the most successful team on its most successful run found fewer than half of the artifacts hidden in the space. That team, CoSTAR (an acronym for “Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Resilient robots) included participants from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CalTech, MIT, KAIST in South Korea and Lulea University of Technology in Sweden. CoSTAR used a mixture of wheeled and legged machines, and in the off-hours would practice everywhere from a local high school to a hotel staircase.

Yet, for all the constraints on signal that impeded navigation, it was the human-built environment that provided the greatest hurdle.

On a tour of the courses, it was easy to see how an environment intuitive to humans is difficult for machines. Backpacks and cellphones were not just placed on corners of roofs, but on internal ledges, impossible to spot without some aerial navigation.

Whereas the tunnel course held relatively flat, the urban circuit features levels upon levels to explore. Stairs and shafts, wide-open rooms with the jangly mess of a mezzanine catwalk, all require teams and robots to explore space in three dimensions. Between runs, the humans running the competition would adjust some features, so that completing the course once does not automatically translate into perfect information for a second attempt.

“How do we design equally hard for air and ground?” Viktor

Orekhov, a DARPA contractor who designed the course, said. “There’s an art to it, not a science. But there’s also a lot of science.”

Part of that art was building ramps into and out of an early room that would otherwise serve as a run-ending chokepoint. Another component was making sure that the course “leveled up” in difficulty the further teams got, requiring more senses and more tools to find artifacts hidden deeper and deeper in the space.

“Using all senses is helpful for humans. It’s helpful for robots, too,” said Orekhov.

Teams competing in the Subterranean Challenge have six months to incorporate lessons learned into their designs and plans. The cave circuit, the next chapter of the Challenge scheduled for August 2020, will inevitably feature greater strain on communications and navigation, and will not even share the at least familiarity of a human-designed spaces seen in the urban circuit. After that, teams will have a year to prepare for the final circuit, set to incorporate aspects of tunnel, urban and cave circuits, and scheduled for August 2021.

DARPA prides itself on spurring technological development, rather than iterating it in a final form. Like the Grand Challenges before it, the goal is at least as much to spark industry interest and collaboration in a useful but unexplored space.

Programming a quadcopter or a tracked robot to find a manikin in a safety-yellow vest is a distant task from tracking and capturing armed people in the battlefields of the future, but the tools workshopped in late nights at a high school cafeteria between urban circuit runs may lead to the actual sensors on the robots brought along by Delta Force on future raids.

The robots of the underground wars of tomorrow are gestating, in competitions and workshops and github pages. Someday, they won’t just be brought along on the raid against a military leader.

Wordlessly — with spinning LiDAR, whirring engines, and millimeter-wave radar — the robots might lead the charge themselves.

Starting in 2017, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s in-house blue sky projects wing, launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, with an explicit goal of creating new medicine to treat a known or novel infection threat within 60 days of that threat being identified, so that the United States can “keep the outbreak from escalating and decrease disruptions to the military and homeland.”

Now, that P3 program could play a role in ultimately bringing about an end to the disruptions caused by COVID-19.

These disruptions have impacted the military, with everything from strained telework resources to canceled exercises to actual infections among servicemembers. And those disruptions are impacting civilian life, too. The CDC recommends as of March 16, 2020, that in-person events that consist of 10 people or more throughout the United States be canceled or postponed because of the strain that new infections of COVID-19 can put on the existing medical system.

As a rule, DARPA seeks to direct its funding to problems that have not yet been solved by other means, and part of the spark behind the Pandemic Prevention Platform was an acknowledgement that, in the face of outbreaks like Zika, H1N1 influenza, and Ebola, “state-of-the-art medical countermeasures typically take many months or even years to develop, produce, distribute, and administer.” That kind of delay means a solution arrives only after an outbreak.

One of the companies awarded contracts by DARPA was AbCellera, which through the program refined its approach to the discovery and manufacture of antibodies that are most effective against a novel infection.

“Through the P3 program, DARPA has set a bold vision to establish effective response capabilities for viral threats,” said Carl Hansen, founding CEO of AbCellera, when DARPA announced that the company had been awarded a contract under the P3 program in March 2018. Hansen cited the danger of the then-recent Ebola and Zika pandemics, saying those outbreaks “have made it clear that we are not equipped to deal with viral pandemics.”

While DARPA projects often anticipate the future, it has been a fast turnaround from anticipating greater pandemics in 2017 and 2018 to tackling one in 2020. AbCellera announced it is partnering with Eli Lilly to develop and manufacture an antibody treatment that can bind and neutralize COVID-19, reports Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News.

That work will involve winnowing down which of over 500 varieties of antibody is the most effective, and then ideally mass producing the result to have a treatment deliverable to patients and hospitals in the next four months.

Anticipating disease, and developing treatments rapidly, is a hard problem.

If a treatment can be engineered at the speed promised, DARPA’s work in the past to anticipate nightmares may be essential to ending one in the present.

AFWERX, the Air Force’s internal catalyst for incorporating innovation from industry and other places outside the Pentagon, announced March 9 the award of a contract for the next generation of business process workflow automation.

The work to be automated is less sortie planning, more data entry. Specifically, the goal is to automate the processing of forms that have to be entered, validated, and approved manually, freeing up humans to do work that requires human input.

That won’t remove humans from the data entry process entirely; instead, their time will be devoted to the cases that need a second look, and as planned the automation tools will provide information and recommendations to aid humans in making the determinations the computers cannot.

OM Group, which received the contract, wants to use mechanical precision to limit the amount of human error in the process.

“Our DoD clients have handwritten forms and complex approval processes that involve tedious work validating data in multiple legacy systems. It’s manual and prone to error. Those delays cost money and they slow down decision-making for service men and women,” said Sangita Subramanian, OM group vice president and chief operating officer in a release. “I challenged our [Robotics Operations Center] to see how automation can help.”

Efficient data management, mitigating human error while retaining human judgement to catch problems machines themselves cannot solve, is a way to take advantage of the tasks computers do best.

Such business automation is not particularly flashy, but even the tip of the spear is downstream from the bureaucracy of war.

As part of the Arctic Edge 20 exercise in Alaska, joint forces from across the Department of Defense and Canada gathered to tackle the challenges of adapting military equipment designed for hot, dry environments to one that is both cold and wet. This included, more notably, figuring out what it would take to make the Light Weight Purification System work in below-freezing temperatures.

But the work of explosive ordnance detonation in the frozen north is worth a closer consideration.

This minor learning experience, a component of a much larger exercise, featured a remote-control robot delivering a water charge to a suspicious target. Water charges blast a suspected improvised explosive device with water, hoping to soak the electronics and render the weapon nonfunctional. Delivering the water charge by robot is a way to make sure that, should the charge fail, the loss is measured in dollars of robot and not human life.

The target in question was a civilian drone model. It was, by all appearances, a DJI-style quadcopter, the kind specifically banned from military use unless it is used as a target or for counter-drone training exercises.

The hobbyist quadcopter’s inclusion in the exercise suggests that quadcopter-borne IEDs are a low-cost enough threat that the impact from them can be felt anywhere. That the main method for disabling any explosives carried by such a drone involves eminently freezable water is all the more reason to test it outside a combat situation. That the default-white of the plastic frame on the drone’s body blends into the landscape effortlessly, as though it were naturally camouflaged, is just further reason to train against it.

Watch the water charge in action below:

Consider the partnership a sort of grand re-launch. GuardBot, in some form or another, has been in development and demonstration since at least 2010, when the Telcel television network specifically commissioned a version, decked out in Telcel’s logo, to cover a soccer match in Mexico.

The Marine Corps tested GuardBot back in 2012 at Quantico and in 2014 at the Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek. As for what makes amphibious spherical robot scouts compelling in 2020, when they were not adopted in 2014, the company points to modularity and scale.

“Back in 2012 we only had a single size GuardBot unit,” said Aquiline Drones Founder and CEO Barry Alexander. “Today, we have multiple units which have been totally redesigned to enable scalability. As such, GuardBots are now modular in design with swappable side pods and have been tested with laser sensors, infrared, thermal imaging, etc. This has made GuardBot extremely versatile but also highly adaptable with the ability to cater to a wide variety of use cases.”

That scale runs from 6.5 inch diameter robot to 7-foot diameter at the largest, with models at 8.5, 9.5, and 12.5 inches and one that is 3 feet in diameter. Increase in size matches an increase in battery life: the 3-foot GuardBot can run for 48 hours, while the 9.5 inch GuardBot has a runtime of 8 hours. Runtime isn’t everything, though.

“Larger diameter GuardBots have distinct advantages such as increased swimming speeds and increased payload capacity,” said Alexander. “The military has shown strong interest in the smaller GuardBot units.”

What they lose in runtime, the smaller robots gain in person-portability, allowing a Soldier or a Marine, say, to deploy such a robot from their field kit and use it to scout ahead.

The GoardBots have a top speed of 12 mph on land and 3mph in water, with the robot mostly floating on the surface of the water. If sonar is installed in the bot’s side pods, it can communicate with divers as far as 100 meters below the water. For more riverine systems, the GuardBot has been tested going upstream in winds of up to 1- mph, and is designed for use in soggy and irregular environments, like beaches and marshes.

The side pods can swap out a range of sensors including video cameras, thermal and infrared cameras, microphones, and others. The partnership with Aquiline Drones adds an always-on internet connectivity, which can support autonomous use of the bots.

“The GuardBot is always ‘online’ even when on the edge with AD Mobile Command Centers providing edge computing and LTE communications back to the cloud,” said Alexander. “In essence, the cloud control that is available everywhere.”

Using a mesh network, the bots could communicate with each other, and Alexander suggests that this could make swarm missions possible, as well as work in tandem with flying drones.

“Human to GuardBot ratio is well under 1, meaning the single operator has been replaced by a mission controller who can direct a decent number of devices, the number varying based on mission complexity,” said Alexander.

When it comes to field use, the primary function of the robot will likely be explosive detection or scouting ahead into hostile areas. Human operators need only sit back command the spherical machine to scout, and hope that the online connection lasts long enough to get useful information.

The attack, which featured multiple remotely piloted drones pursuing the same objectives, is a reminder that the capacity to launch drone strikes is hardly limited to superpowers. Turkey’s drone program has developed, over years, several armed drones that are rough analogs to American-operated models like the Reaper, Predator and Shadow.

“This was a mass coordinated attack, not a ‘swarm’ — ‘swarm’ implies autonomous capabilities and UAVs coordinating among themselves,” said Samuel Bendett, an adviser at the Center for Naval Analyses.

While swarming autonomy remains a research project for nations, even such a labor-intensive operation as the mass use of remotely piloted drones offers advantages over flying human-occupied vehicles on the same missions.

“Given a very complicated battleground in Syria — where Syrian and Russian air defenses protect key assets, and where Iranian forces operate alongside their Assad allies — Turkey’s decision to send a mass coordinated UAV attack points to its availability of options,” said Bendett. “Rather than send a piloted aircraft that could be lost, with the pilot killed, Turkey sent unmanned systems, whose loss is less profound and does not ultimately impact Turkish military capability. Turkey is also able to gather key intel on Syrian air defenses, especially those that managed to down Turkish UAVs.”

Those Syrian air defenses were about to shoot down at least seven drones, including at least one Anka-S, priced at tens of millions of dollars. The attack was not without cost to Turkey, but despite the damage inflicted by anti-air defenses, the drones were still able to hit their targets. Defending against drone operations may mean adopting different tools than those used to deter human incursions.

Turkey stood up its drone industry in light of a prohibition from the United States on purchasing armed drones, and since then has also developed those military drones for export. Those drones, like the Bayraktar, have been explored to Ukraine and Libya. Turkey has even reached out to Ukraine for engines to power a long-range drone.

With the capabilities of its drones proven in combat, Turkey joins the United States, United Kingdom, France, Israel, China and Iran as drone-armed nations. A swarm the recent strike was not, but for the people targeted on the ground, a remotely piloted salvo is just as deadly a proposition.

Can Parrot be the “Swiss Army Drone?”

It is rare that a military is synonymous with an accessory. It is rarer still that the military accessory itself is so successful it goes on to be a universal term for “useful in multiple ways.” But, thanks to the long legacy and success of the standard-use military knives purchased from Victorinox (and, formerly, Wenger), the Swiss Army has a reputation for getting the most out of what it acquires.

The Parrot contract is part of the Swiss Army’s “Mini UAV Program,” or Swiss MUAS. In its announcement, Parrot pointed in part to the “high level of cybersecurity required by the Swiss armed forces” as key to why it was selected.

Left out of the announcement is product specifications, quantities and prices, though it was clarified that the work will go through Parrot’s senseFly subsidiary. With senseFly’s traditional offerings all fixed-wing drones, it is safe to assume that the Swiss Army Drone will be a fixed wing as well. A notable feature, too, of senseFly’s line is that the drones specialize in mapping, rather than the real-time situational awareness that militaries tend to get from quadcopters.

While maintaining its presence in the toy drone market, Parrot has prioritized development of the ANAFI drone for the professional and commercial market, with a focus on rescue, inspection, and surveying.

The Swiss Army is not the first military contract Parrot has pursued. In 2019, Parrot was selected as one of six companies with commercial roots to offer drones for a reconnaissance study by the Defense Innovation Unit and the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence.

For the U.S. government, adapting commercial drones to meet government security and tasking needs has a complicated relationship. The Pentagon has multiple times banned the use of drones with components made in China, citing cybersecurity fears, and the military is relying instead on quadcopters made by more boutique firms stateside.

On the civilian side of government, the Department of the Interior worked with commercial dronemaker DJI, based in China, to create a hardware and firmware package for the drone that met both security and cost needs, only to find the drones banned from use months after their adoption.

While the Swiss military may not have the same degree of concern about the origin of its drones, it is worth noting that the company “designs and engineers its products in Europe, mainly in France and Switzerland.” Component parts, like for most drone companies of any scale, are likely sourced elsewhere.

Update: an earlier version of this story stated that Parrot was pulling out of the commercial drone market. That has since been corrected.